Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (26 page)

But realistically, I
wasn’t going to take the time to bake a pie. The Girlfriend was hungry, and she
wanted pizza. So, I made Open-Faced Pot-Pie Pizza. It’s
all
the comfort of a pot pie, but easier to carry around with you!

Ingredients

·
        
3
pieces of frozen na’an

·
        
Some
leftover chicken

·
        
Some
leftover chicken gravy

·
        
Some
celery

·
        
Some
carrots

·
        
Some
mushrooms

·
        
A
piece of cheese

Instructions

Defrost
the na’an. Meanwhile, chop the chicken, celery, carrots and mushrooms into
pizza-topping sized chunks.

Take
the na’an out of the oven. Carefully pour chicken gravy on each slice.

Place
chunks of chicken, celery, carrots and mushrooms randomly on each slice.

Put
a piece of cheese on one of the slices for The Girlfriend.

Put
it all back in the oven for a while until it looks like pizza.

ALL
THE COMFORT OF A POT PIE—

WITH
THE CONVENIENCE OF A PIZZA SLICE!

There you have it. An
Indian-Italian classic. I’ll admit I was worried about this one. I didn’t want
my mashup to be the food equivalent of those horrible ‘crossover episodes’ on TV.
You know, where the cast of
Beverly Hillbillies
inexplicably visits
Petticoat
Junction
?

As it turned out, my
mix of Milan, Mumbai, and the Midwest was a hit. I’m already thinking about
what I’ll combine next.

 Maybe I’ll put German
sausage on a French baguette and call it a Vichy Sandwich. Or I might mix
Newfoundland and New Orleans, and create . . . whatever that would be. All I
know for sure is that, through my cooking, I am single-handedly bringing the
world together, one dish at a time.

Note:
I have since withdrawn my trademark application for the name ‘Pot Pie Pizza,’
as there are, according to the web, “about 168,000” people who have used that
phrase. There are also at least 77,100 people who have invented “naan pizza,”and
65,800 who beat me to the phrase “non-pizza.” Damn you, Google.

I’m never sure how to
describe what it is I write. I could say, “I write short humorous essays, sort
of like how newspaper columns were, but in first person, like a blog,” but
that’s not very catchy. It’s not exactly ‘high concept.’

I could combine the two
concepts and tell people I write ‘blogumns.’ Haven’t you always thought there
should be more words in English that end in ‘mn?’

What you call something
matters. Take rock and roll. I think even die-hard fans of ‘My Backyard’ and ‘The
Polka Tulk Blues Band’ would have to admit that ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd’ and ‘Black
Sabbath’ are better band names.

It’s the same with
food. There are certain foods that I’m convinced wouldn’t sell at all if they
had different names. Or more accurate names.

If you’ve ever had
beignets
,
you know they’re a delicious pastry popular in New Orleans. But I’m guessing
the lines at Mardi Gras would be a bit shorter if they were called “Deep-Fried
Dough Balls (which
should
be a band name).”

Sometimes all it takes
is a vaguely evocative name to distract people into buying an otherwise odious
food. Case in point:  ‘Vienna Franks.”

These little Franken-franks
are composed of a disturbing paste made from chicken and pork and beef and turkey
. . . parts.

Then the ‘franks’ are
stuffed in a can in some sort of briny sauce. Since they’re Viennese, though,
people think they’re being cosmopolitan. Anyway, even though I KNOW they’re
already
cooked
, they always look to me like they
need to be cooked
again
.
That seems wrong.

Leave it to the
gastronomically-challenged Brits to come up with a questionable food
idea,
and then give it a name that sounds even more abhorrent. It’s bad enough you
serve steamed suet pudding—for God’s sake, do you have to call it ‘Spotted
Dick?’

Call me square, but I
like the
name
of a dish to give me
some
indication of what might be
in
the dish before I
order
the dish.

Recently voted the best
restaurant in the world,
Noma
in Copenhagen has an entrée called
‘Oyster and the Ocean,’ and that name doesn’t help at all.

I’d like to know
exactly
what
comes
with
the oyster and
what you’ve done to it. Not just where you got it. Same reason I wouldn’t order
something called “Chicken and Stuff From The Ground.”

I dig those long,
enigmatic, conceptual names you see on menus in Chinese restaurants. “Ants
Climbing A Tree” may not sound as
appetizing
as ‘marinated
ground meat over noodles,’ but at the same time, I kinda
like
having my
dinner tell me a little story.

One night I ordered
something called “Bean Curd Made By A Pockmarked Woman,” which is such a great
name it should count as dinner
and
a movie.

I never know what to
call the things I cook, but I feel I have to call a dish
something
.
It always seemed lazy to me for an artist to call something ‘Untitled.”

This
was done by the Australian Charles Green Shaw. Here’s an idea, Chuck. When
you’re
done
with your painting, take the extra five minutes and tell me
what it’s supposed to be. It doesn’t have to be literal, but at least make an
effort.

When I try to name a
dish (in case I want to recreate it) I’m usually
too
literal. That’s
because I figure, if the name of the dish contains enough details, I’ll
remember how I made it.

Unfortunately,
The Girlfriend has yet to ask for my ‘Tortilla Crusted Spinach Topped Curried
Chicken Thighs,’ so I’m thinking I need punchier names.

Sometimes
I try to be too clever. We had small burgers on English muffins a while back,
which I now insist on calling ‘Royal Sliders.’ And the cheap cut of pork I
braised in beer – I call that dish “My Drunk Butt.”

There
are times when I come up with a great name for a dish
first
, and then I
figure out what might go in it. I have yet to make creation called ‘Peaches and
Herb Chicken,’ but if I ever go to a seventies party, that’s what I’m bringing.

I
never come up with good names for my ground turkey entrées, because no matter
what I might want to make out of pound of Jennie-O, it always ends up as
meatloaf.

It reminds me of when
my mom crocheted. Despite telling me every year that she was making me a
sweater, it always turned into an afghan on the back of our couch.

Once, I got ambitious
and made a turkey
roll
, and it looked perfect. I put it in the oven, and
when I took it out, it had settled and flattened and . . . become yet another
meatloaf.

I
decided if I were going to keep making variations on meatloaf, I would need to be
more creative with the presentation. Hopefully that would inspire a more
creative name.

So the next time I made
a meatloaf, I made it
in a square casserole pan,
the kind in which you
would bake a cake. Right there, it would be different than its boring loaf cousins,
because, hey, it’s now a meat
cake.

When it was done, I
sliced it in half
sideways
, and spread a thin layer of
mashed
potatoes
on the bottom layer. I know – I was out of control!

But that wasn’t the end
of my innovation. I replaced the top half, and topped the whole thing with two
kinds of crumbled up crackers!

I call my creation
“Double Crumb Comfort Cake.” It’s catchy, it’s fun to say, plus it’s got a
built-in slogan for marketing –

“Sounds like dessert,
but tastes like dinner!”

There’s always a little
down time when you’re cooking, whether you’re waiting for your eggs to poach,
your onions to get translucent, or your roux to . . . get rouxey enough.

I think cooking is like
baseball, or jazz, in that, to enjoy them, you have to get past the fact that,
in all three, there seem to be times when nothing’s really, you know,
happening
.

The biggest
difference
between baseball, jazz, and cooking, of course, is that Ken Burns hasn’t done a
twelve part documentary about cooking. Yet.

I use my idle time in
the kitchen thinking about philosophy and coming up with crackpot theories (or
crockpot
theories—see what I did there? Get it? Never mind).

I don’t bother with
meaning-of-life stuff, since that ground has been covered pretty well. I like
to
fold
my philosophy
into
my cooking, like I’m making a
pie-crust out of ideas. And pie crusts should be flaky, right?

I wrestle with the
questions that have troubled cooks for centuries, like “Can you cook chicken in
beef stock?” Which, by the way I
will
not
do. It just seems wrong and disturbing.

Or, “Is it wrong to
have rice AND potatoes in the same meal?” This is known amongst
philosopher-cooks as the Starch Conundrum.

As much time as I’ve
spent
thinking
about
cooking
,
I have yet to figure out the answer to the fundamental question all aspiring
chefs should ask themselves—”What is your catchphrase?”

A cook without a
catchphrase is just . . . someone cooking! How dull is that? From “Kick it up a
notch” to “Yummo,” the chefs making the big TV bucks all have a phrase or a
word that brands them. It’s the thing they say when they add the lemon zest, or
make peaks in their meringue.

Initially, I wanted my
hook to be just one syllable—one big flavorful syllable, like Emeril’s “Bam!” (on
a side note, why does Emeril get “Bam!”
and
“”Kick it up a notch”? I
think he should have to pick one and give the other one to an up-and-coming
chef).

At one point I thought
I found my catchphrase when I spent a week or two saying “Boom!” while I was
cooking.

Now, I’m new at this,
so I may have overused it. I guess it’s overkill to shout “Boom!” when you’re
just, say, adding a sprig of parsley. As it turned out, it didn’t matter,
because some sandwich guy on the Food Network beat me to it.

I considered going
really retro with some vintage slang. I could shout “Applesauce!” but that
really only makes sense if I’ve just made applesauce.