The other day I had a rare opportunity. The better part of a day home alone. By myself. I cranked the tunes. I danced naked. I drank from the bottle. I wiped a booger on my bath robe. I rolled a dube. I smoked it. All by myself. I downloaded some more porn and saved it to flash disk. Then I hit the pantry. I had the munchies. A bag of honey bbq potato chips, some nachos, an apple, half of a tuna fish sandwich and some semi-sweet chocolate chips later I'm ready to get down to some serious eating. Oh, wait, I forgot the two cookies and the handful of ranch flavored crackers...
Anyway, the next thing you know I'm back at the computer and I'm Google-ing my ass off. I needed a recipe for "something". I didn't care what it was. I just had the need to open the spice cabinet, heat up some olive oil in the biggest skillet that I have, boil some pasta, dice up about a half a bushel of veggies, grab the largest mixing bowl I have, dig out the measuring spoons, shred a pound or two of Velveeta, make a pie crust and go down into the storage unit and bring up my turkey roaster and just see what happened. So, I find the recipe online. I had all of the ingredients. I had the pan. I had the oven. I was all set to go. I'm half way thru this recipe before I actually look at it closely. It got sort of complicated. No, actually, it got VERY complicated.
First, the flour. OMg!!! The "flour" in the ingredient list turns out to be rice flour once you get into the recipe. Rice flour??? Yeah, right... And it needs to be sifted before you add it in. SIFTED??? LMAO!!! OK, I actually do have a flour sifter. It's a fridge magnet. Holds about a teaspoon. Yeah, not happening anytime soon... Rice flour. I just put about three cups of uncooked rice into the blender and turned it on for about half an hour.
The vinegar. Again, hidden in the recipe. I has to be rice vinegar. I lucked out, I had some. Great in potato salad. Had it not been in the cabinet I would have used apple cider or balsamic vinegar instead. It's vinegar. Either ramp it up or water it down. Get over it...
The butter. Oh, yeah, the butter... Of course, it has to clarified. Clarified butter is perhaps the dumbest damned thing I have ever heard of. Only the French could up with something that stupid. Yes, I know how to clarify butter. I think the last time I did it was about 1981. What can I say, I had a craving for some Coquille St. Jacques from scratch. As god is my witness, I will NEVER clarify butter again!!! It's just one of those ditzty-ass kitchen tricks that is even too gay for me. Yeah...
Then there was the sugar. Turbanado sugar. Really??? The dark brown kind. Really??? Organic. Just a fucking minute here!!! Dark brown organic turbanado sugar??? Do I look like I fucking live in Hawaii??? Yeah, trust me, brown sugar went in that mixing bowl.
The parsley had to be fresh. Fresh Italian parsley. The asiago had to be from some cheese factory in New Hampshire. Where the cows were fed a strict diet of Cheerio's, mini-marshmallows and Evian. The raisins were "recommended" to be from some place deep in the Hindu-Kush of Pakistan. The diced green onions didn't seem too hard. Until I saw that I should have started to brine them last night. The basil had to be some strange variety. Mountain grown as I recall. Bolivia, I think. It just went down hill from the basil. Damned near every ingredient in this recipe was special. And not in that short bus kind of way.
WTF wrote this nightmare??? This recipe would have scared Wolfgang Puck out of the kitchen!!! Even my recipes aren't this nuts!!! For those of you that I have shared my recipes with, you now have a learning curve of what I am talking about. I went back to Google and brought the recipe up again. I discovered links. To more of this loon's recipes. OMg, they're all this nuts. If not more so. One called for unbleached salt. WTF is unbleached salt??? Another one called for saffron. Fresh saffron. When was the last time you saw fresh fucking saffron??? It's from India for fucks sake!!! It takes awhile to get to Madison. One recipe called for home-dried cranberries. You gotta be kidding me. Home-dried cranberries??? Lady, I live in Wisconsin. We're literally up to our tits in those here!!! We buy them at stores. Then there was the onion chives. Onion chives??? Hmmm... onion... chives... Onion chives??? Excuse me but the last time I looked chives WERE onions!!! Trust me, I've grown them. They're supposed to taste like that. THEY'RE ONIONS!!!
In quiet resignation I admitted defeat. I had been bested in my own kitchen by a stranger that was sorely under or over medicated with access to a keyboard. In the middle of the night. With a cocktail and a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. And a rolled up dollar bill with a rubber band around it.
I grabbed the cell phone, speed-dialed Domino's and said extra large Special. With extra cheese. Can you put some jalapenos on that for me? Half an hour later, instant gratification...
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