Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (18 page)

That’s because it had
156 recipes, and he doesn’t like
even
numbers
(readers with OCD will appreciate this, once
they’re done counting the number of words in the preceding paragraph).

Mitch also acknowledged
that his OCD can be an asset in the kitchen:

“Oh,
God yes! When I’m cooking, I’m dialed in. And if I go into the walk-in, and
that shit isn’t the way I want it, with the handles turned, or if anything’s
not facing forward, with labels, and properly dated . . . I’ve actually had the
health department take photographs, for their training.”

Since he used to knock
heads at rock and roll clubs, I wanted to know what he listens to when he’s
cooking
—

“It’s
gotta be movin’ . . . Led Zeppelin, or Allman Brothers off the first two
albums, because you lose Berry Oakley and Duane Allman it’s not the Allman
Brothers. Or blues—electric slide blues, someone like Sonny Boy Williamson.”

And as for the first
meal he cooked for someone important to him?

“A
chateaubriand I made for my mom and dad.”

When I asked Mitch to
name his favorite utensil, he didn’t hesitate to give me  a very. . . pointed
answer:

“
Fuckin’
knives! I’ve got a couple of gems in my office, and I’ve got some surgical
tools.”

The
‘
tools
’
included
this
bizarre
finger-amputation doohickey that
looks
like a cross between
a cigar-clipper and a gun
. I
t was comforting to
remember
that he doesn’t drop
acid anymore.

Bonus question
—i
f
 he had a time machine, where and when would he like to have cooked?

“
Fifteenth
century Italy. When Catherine Di’ Medici left Italy to go to France, she took
her whole retinue with her, including her retinue of cooks.

They
felt the French were coarse, backward people, and she was NOT gonna eat that food.
So the Italians came with all their talents, and they
trained
the French
chefs.

Now
France is known as this gastronomic capital. They owe every fuckin’ bit of that
to Catherine Di’ Medici. She invented high heels . . . Jesus Christ, she did
everything! She was a great chick—she took a bunch of knuckle-dragging
Neanderthals and taught ‘em how to cook.”

Note:
She was also a tyrant responsible for

the
massacre of thousands of Huguenots.

My question about
adding  a gourmet touch to the classic Minnesota ‘hotdish’ elicited a
surprisingly passionate (and deep) response
—

“Fuck
that! These guys do that, take classic food and ‘deconstruct’ it  . . .  ‘Oh,
we’re doing it with some different cheese or we’re doing it with homemade this
and that or whatever,’ and I’m like, that isn’t it!

Wanna
talk comfort food? Go down to Winona and talk to the women there that do the
funerals. Every time somebody dies, they get the call . . . they bring hot
dish—that’s what they do! And they’re not using venison, or, my God, heirloom
tomatoes. Fuck that.”

You wouldn’t think that
in such a meat-centric place, customers would rave about the porridge, but
trust me, they rave. Senator Al Franken’s a fan, as was Nora Ephron.

It’s a concoction of
maple syrup, blueberries, craisins, hazelnuts, heavy cream and Native American
hand-parched wild rice, and it’s also a great lesson in commitment.

When Hell’s Kitchen
opened a decade ago (that’s about three hundred years in restaurant time), there
were two items on the menu that were less than successful
—
his
‘shrimp and grits’ and the porridge.

The shrimp and grits
might have flopped because, as Mitch puts it,
“It’s the Midwest. Nobody
knows what grit
is
.
NOBODY fuckin’ bought
it. I mean NOBODY!”

He eventually gave up
on the grits, but he believed in his porridge, at one point giving it away to
get people to try it (the same business model my pot dealer uses). Now, Mitch’s
porridge
“has taken on a life of its own
.
”

I
learned a lot in the hour I spent with Mitch. For instance, if you want pecans
in your cinnamon rolls, you should sautée them first in a pan with salt and
butter.

Then you add them to
the dough
after
it rises, or else your nuts will
be mealy (and how many meals have we all had that were ruined by mealy nuts?).

Oh, and I learned that
bear meat is
“stupid lean”
and
“sweeter than venison.”

I mentioned to him that
it seems every time I ‘create’ something, I discover that a hundred thousand
amateur chefs with internet connections came up with the same idea. He told me,

“Look,
it’s like our lemon ricotta pancakes. I don’t remember ever
hearing
about lemon ricotta pancakes, I just remember thinking ‘I want to put some
lemon and ricotta in a goddamn pancake!’

Bottom
line is we
did
create these things, and if a
million other people created the same thing, big deal!”

Coolest moment for me:
when I told him about my special turkey burgers (with maple syrup in the middle
of the patty), and he said,
“I would have never thought of doing that.”
I chose to take that as a compliment.

That led to his homemade maple-bison sausage, and then we
were talking about the smells that come off the grill from the sugars breaking
down, and suddenly we were just a couple of cooks, swapping stories about
caramelization.

Cooking With Testosterone

Here’s how I know that
I’m not a traditional alpha male: the idea of grilling does NOTHING for me. I
simply do not have the ‘barbecue gene’ in my DNA. I’m fairly certain I have the
‘show tunes gene,’ but that’s rarely needed at a backyard picnic.

Sure, I enjoy the taste
of barbecued meat, but I have no interest in creating it.
Anthropologically
,
I get it. The whole ‘primal flashback to killing a wooly mammoth and throwing
its carcass onto an open fire’ thing. But the deal is, human society has
evolved, and now we can cook INDOORS.

The problem I have with
the ‘primal’ argument for grilling’s appeal is that most people who throw slabs
of dead animal on the fire didn’t hunt and kill the animal themselves.
(Yes,
vegetarians, I know you can grill vegetables, too. Not my point. Calm down.)

It’s just that you
don’t really get that connection to primitive times and feel a visceral bond
with your food if you’re slapping lamb patties from Trader Joe’s on your Weber.
You should have to kill a damned sheep and drag it to your back yard.

I don’t embrace outdoor
cooking for the same reason I don’t churn my own butter or do the dishes in a
wooden barrel – because I don’t have to!

Romanticize your
primitive ancestors all you want; I like to believe that my
forebears
wandered for centuries looking for somewhere to plug in a toaster oven.

Beyond the convenience,
cooking inside the home offers a multitude of advantages for the modern family.
For instance, you’ll probably have fewer bugs crawling near or landing on your
food (unless you happen to be renting this studio apartment I had in Chicago).

And the most amazing
benefit to cooking inside? If it starts to rain or snow, you can continue to
cook! Again, unless you’re in that apartment I mentioned.

There’s also very
little subtlety to cooking on a grill for most folks. It’s usually some guy on
his fifth beer saying things like “How pink do you want your burger?” or “Could
someone go back inside and get the ketchup?” And occasionally there’s “How long
do you think we can leave the potato salad out?”

Here’s how nuanced
grilling is—a website purporting to be a complete resource for grilling
techniques addresses the all-important temperature issue thusly:

“So
how hot is hot? The rule is to hold your hand above the cooking grate and start
counting (until you can’t hold your hand there anymore)…five seconds for ‘low,’
four seconds for ‘medium,’ two seconds for ‘high.’”

Grilling culture (which
apparently is not an oxymoron) is still dominated by men, I suppose because men
are usually more about tools than technique.

I’ve had more than one
male friend rave about his new grill in terms usually reserved for a new
girlfriend. Not too many men will call you into the kitchen and say, “Hey, Jim,
check out my new five-speed blender –she’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

Having never bought a
grill, I was curious how much people spend for the pleasures of cooking
alfresco
.
A hundred bucks? Five hundred? It is just a glorified fire pit, right? Then I
found this in an online catalog:

“The
Talos Outdoor Cooking Suite is an open-air professional kitchen. The
hand-crafted stainless steel exterior houses a 42” grilling area, three 25,000
BTU cast burners, a 20,000 BTU searing station and griddle, a hardwood cutting
board, rotisserie, sink and a warming drawer. It even has a bartending station.”

Because
when the guys are over at my place (“It’s show tunes night, guys!”) I need almost
FOUR FEET of grilling space.

Oh,
and you can’t
really
cook without having at least enough BTUs to power a
steam locomotive.
And
I can’t count the number of friends who have left
my place disappointed because I don’t have a dedicated ‘searing station.’

I
love that it’s described as a ‘professional kitchen.’ I’m almost sure that
anyone who can afford this probably could put all of these features in their
ACTUAL kitchen, eliminating the need to go outside at all. But maybe I just
don’t get it.

Incidentally,
the above model retails at thirty-five
THOUSAND
dollars. You and your
friends could fly to Argentina for dinner with that money. Or, buy a couple
dozen cows and you’ve got steaks for years.