This blog is offered as a public service for men who are not
skilled in the kitchen. You need to read this if you are one of those men who,
like me, don’t know the difference between ‘sauté’
and ‘watch out, I think it’s gonna blow.”
I believe I am qualified to offer this advice since I just survived three days
of “batching it” with no one to cook and serve my meals EXCEPT ME. The cause of
my deprivation was that the Mrs. spent three days away from home, provoking my
enforced servitude in fending for myself. Fortunately, she had left a fridge
full of leftovers and fixin’s for sandwiches so that the first two days went by
in a flash and I was neither hungry nor desperate enough to actually cook
something. By day three, the supply of left-overs had become dangerously
diminished. At dinner-time, it was clear that if I was to survive one more day
I would need to cook something.
I began my kitchen adventure in the only logical fashion for
a man of my caliber in the kitchen: I poured myself a drink. Things went
downhill from there. As the effects of the drink began to wear off, I donned an
apron and began my search for something edible in our kitchen. After consulting
the pantry unsuccessfully, I rummaged around in our freezer and, wonder of wonders,
found dinner. As I gingerly fondled the bright orange package, a dim
recollection of instructions passed thru my mind: “and there is a frozen dinner in the freezer that you can heat for your
dinner” seemed to ring a bell. I greedily took out the package and looked
at the backside of the gaily-decorated ‘Gourmet Blend’ of frozen food. It
should have been a warning sign.
My experience had been that instructions on the back of a
package are a warning of bad things to come. And now, here is the pivotal
advice to men: Don’t believe what is
written on the back of frozen food packages.
I’ll illustrate this with the continuation of my story.
Unlike my normal practice, I decided to read the instructions on my gourmet
chicken dinner package in their entirety, including the bold type at the end, READY TO EAT IN 11 MINUTES.
“Ah-ha, a gourmet chicken and rice dinner ready in eleven
minutes. And it has vegetables in the rice with a gourmet sauce. What could be
better.”
I was so pleased with my good fortune in finding the frozen
dinner that I decided to have another glass of wine. Thus emboldened, I began to
cook by following the instructions. The first step was easy enough, “Thaw
contents in hot water. Do not microwave.”
I put hot water in a bowl and placed the individual frozen
food packages containing the chicken, the rice and sauce into the hot water.
The small and pliable package containing the chicken floated in the water but
the big package of rice went “plop” into the bowl like a giant ice cube. The
package containing the brown sauce was also hard enough to be mistaken for a
frozen turd. Undeterred, I tossed it into the bowl of water and went on to step
two, “Saute chicken from pouch in a
preheated skillet with one tablespoon oil on med-high heat.”
Ever mindful of the written instructions and the “READY TO
EAT IN ELEVEN MINUTES,” I decided to begin my saute (ing?). I cut open the chicken
package and dumped the contents into the hot pan. Whoosh! The hot skillet with
its big tablespoon of oil just beginning to sizzle didn’t seem to appreciate
the sudden infusion of cold water that was included in the bag of chicken. As
the chicken fell into the pan, the hot oil and boiling water came jumping out,
providing a continuous mist of hot oil on the surface of the stove and the
floor. Whoa, this wasn’t quite what I had bargained on. I almost spilled my
wine as I rushed to lift the pan from the stove hoping to prevent my chicken
from hopping out of the pan along with the popping oil. For my efforts, I was
rewarded with an oil-coated shirtsleeve and little drops of oil floating in my
wine.
After the pan cooled, I decided that someone had made a
small error with the instructions. I turned the heat down until the violence of
the popping oil subsided enough so that the oil only had enough energy to jump
to the stove, but not to reach the floor or my shirtsleeve. Now, I reasoned, I’ll
probably fail to have dinner READY IN ELEVEN MINUTES, but better to be safe in
the matter of hot oil.
I considered step three, “add the rice and vegetables to the pan and cover.” I lifted the
rice package from the water. Through the clear plastic I could see it was still
a large lump of frozen rice with an occasional green bean sticking out like a
stick in a snowball. “Ummmm. This requires more drastic action than floating in
a bowl of water drawn from the tap. I filled the tea kettle and put it on to
boil. In eleven minutes the tea kettle was shesssssshing with steam. I poured
the boiling water on the frozen ball of rice and the brown turd forgetting for
a moment the hazardous nature of molten plastic in one’s diet. There. The turd
seemed to move in the plastic bag. All the boiling water was gone so I refilled
the tea kettle and set it back on the stove to boil more water.
It occurred to me that my chicken had been simmering for
more than 20 minutes what with the hot oil clean-up and tea kettle business so
I decided to complete step two even though the rice was now a small snowball
with bits of green and yellow chunks moving about freely in the bag. I dumped
the whole mess in the pan, covered it with a lid that I had found earlier and
concentrated on melting the turd.
After another eleven minutes, the turd melted. With great
ceremony, I cut the bag and added the brown mass to the skittle. The chicken
had dried to a little white strings bobbing about in the overwhelming glob of
white rice dotted with green beans, pale orange carrots and little yellow
chunks that I later learned were supposed to be egg bits.
Step 4, “ cook on
medium low for 5-7 minutes and stir.”
I stirred and then tasted. The rice was still frozen. The last line of
the instructions had an ominous note, “Product
must be cooked to an internal temperature of 165°F, determined by using a food
thermometer.” I quickly decided that at this stage of my life I wasn’t
going to stoop to the use of a ‘food thermometer’ when I had a particularly
serviceable tongue. Besides, I didn’t know if we owned such a device nor where
one might be located in our kitchen that is full of mysterious tools. I
replaced the cover and turned up the heat, hoping to someday melt all the rice.
Some hours later I sat down to my very own rice and chicken
dinner. It wasn’t too bad, and the preparation was OK, although I thought the
cooking instructions needed work, especially the part about READY TO EAT IN ELEVEN MINUTES.
So men, here is the advice that should be posted somewhere
in your man-cave: if you find yourself ‘batching it’ and eating becomes
essential, I suggest going to the nearest fast-food restaurant and never, ever believe what is written on the backside of food packages.
