What I’m Playing

A dad cooking primer

 Laugh, punks!
Aug 232010
 

Since I’m pretty sure there will be future blog posts about various meals constructed by my father, I figured some background would be a solid idea for now. I can cover some of the important basics when it comes to my dad’s cooking…’style’. I love the guy but…goddamn, he really should be restricted from having access to a kitchen as much as possible.

Let’s start off with an important part…the 4 Basic Food Groups : George Edition…

Meat : The greasier the better; Starch : You know, to have something to be covered in…; Cream : Or some sort of cream mixture forming sauce; Salt/Pepper : He keeps this one limited to his own plate, thanks to a smoking habit that’s lasted longer than I’ve been alive.

Okay, that out of the way, on to the kitchen tips!

-Use as many pots and pans as humanly possible! After all, some other schmuck has to do all the cleanup, so go wild! The weird thing is how directly counter this runs to everything else my dad does. For some reason, he hits the kitchen and the concept of efficiency is sucked right out of his head.

-It ain’t done until it has a sauce! Everything must be slathered in something else. A sauce, perhaps a gravy. If you have no alternative, leave a skiff of oily grease on top of whatever the Hell you just made. The final dish just has to be glopped with something. And the only way to ensure that the sauce is good is to taste it…so pour yourself a big mug of whatever you’ve made, be it beef gravy or that hollandaise from a package that kind of seems like melted plastic with a  yellowed hue.

-The proper balance for any sort of pre-dressed salad is a 1:1 proportion between salad and dressing. Never is this lesson drummed home more clearly than when dad makes coleslaw, and the forkful you put in your mouth turns in to biting in to a mass of mayonnaise with a few bits of shredded vegetable within it’s horrifying mass. Truly, the vegetation is the garnish for the dressing when dad does a salad.

-You have a bunch of spices in the cupboard for a reason, so use the damn things! And who the Hell cares about what other people consider proper and weird blends?! Nothing wrong with adding a bunch of dill and paprika to something you’ve just drowned in a sort of lemony slurry.

-July is the perfect time for roasting massive animals indoors. Why just this past July, he decided we should have a turkey dinner with all the usual holiday side dishes. I have absolutely no idea why. Apparently, it was because the grand kids were visiting but they seemed very confused, and kept wondering what holiday it was to demand such a feast. That segues nicely in to the next tip, actually :

-Kids will eat anything you will, so change nothing! Keeping in mind that this is a man who enjoys offal in stuffing, then seems shocked and dismayed when the kids don’t want it. Yes…truly a surprise THAT was…children don’t want to consume animal organs…who knew?

-If you don’t cook meat to well done, it will spring back to life and kill you. And by well done, I mean cooked until it’s a dry and lifeless husk of what used to be a cut of some animal.

-Vegetables are a garnish at best. Nuke a few green beans or whatever to keep the wife happy, but what everyone REALLY wants is approximately 3 pounds of potatoes and a beef roast slathered in mushroom gravy. But that’s okay, because potatoes are a vegetable, right? They grow in the goddamn ground, they MUST be part of the vegetable group on that food pyramid! Same with baked beans…beans are vegetables, so that totally works! I’m not making up either of these examples.

-Get creative! Want to make a mint sauce for peas (because who doesn’t want that, right?), but don’t have any actual mint, or the faintest idea of how to use it? Well, everyone has a tube of toothpaste in their bathroom…improvise! So what if there are health warnings on the tube indicating that consumption isn’t a good idea? They’re talking about massive quantities!

-Don’t limit certain foods to certain meals. Eat whatever you want, whenever you want. Years ago, my dad was working and also doing some courses in Safety through correspondence, so he’d get up at 3 in the morning and work on those before heading off to work for the day. Lemme tell ya, there is nothing as stomach turningly weird as waking up at 6:30 to the smell of clam chowder having been recently heated up on the stove.

That pretty much covers the basics. Welcome to the ‘wonderful’ world of cooking like my dad! IF you actually decide to follow this basic plan, I insist on having you fill out your Last Will & Testament prior to starting. Oh, and that’s the craziest part of all of this…he doesn’t have high cholesterol. Figure that one out.

  • Tammy

    Please tell me he didn’t actually use toothpaste for the mint sauce..and put it on…peas!? Salad that has 1:1 dressing is gross, I hate when its just dripping in dressing…yuk

  • Erron Anderson

    Tammy said it first, was the toothpaste sauce just a ridiculous my dad hasn’t, but i wouldn’t put it past him example, or did he really?

    So funny I think this- ‘Nothing wrong with adding a bunch of dill and paprika to something you’ve just drowned in a sort of lemony slurry’ twisted my face into that perma revolted/amused look and it stayed there to the end. My mom is a terrible cook too. Cream sauce, and cream of mushroom sauce on everything, and sweet and sour (read vinegar and sugar) riblets 2 or 3 times a week. ewww There are very few dishes my mom did well, in fact I can’t think of one on the spot.

  • http://www.peerpressureworks.com Cliff

    While I wasn’t there for it, the toothpaste mint sauce thing absolutely happened. Maybe Pam will come along and share memories of that event.

    And the thing is, my dad actually CAN cook. He just goes so far out in to left field a lot of the time that you’d perhaps think that he’s clueless in the kitchen, and his obsession for cream sauce and the like just goes WAAAYYYYY too far.

    Hmmm…maybe that belief that he’s clueless in there is what he’s going for…:)

  • Pam

    Yup, the peas with toothpaste really happened. He served it to me and the kids when we stayed there before our move to Winnipeg. We sat down to hamburgers and peas for dinner. I was so shocked- it was a normal, kid-friendly meal and it involved vegetables!! He watched me take my first bite of peas with great anticipation. I put it in my mouth. I chewed. I fought the gag reflex as I tried to figure out what the crap the man did to the food! He asked what I thought. “Um, it’s interesting Dad! What did you put on the peas?” “Oh, it’s my homemade mint sauce! Can you guess what the secret ingredient is?” “Oh, um, gee, let me think…” I chugged a glass of water, which rinsed the grit off my teeth and made a lightbulb come on in my head. A horrible, nasty, nauseating lightbulb. “You didn’t use toothpaste, did you? DID YOU??” He chuckled gleefully. “Yes! I find it gives it that special something.’” “Yeah, special. Kids, don’t eat the peas.”

    Toothpaste is meant to be spit out, not ingested. Peas don’t need mint sauce. And who goes looking for ingredients in the bathroom??!

    It was worse than the time he thought you could substitute chunky peanut butter for peanut oil.

    It does, however, give me a story that’s hard to top. My friend Richard thought his dad was bad, but all he did was make rice with orange Tang in it. I ate Colgate Peas!

  • Pam

    I should add that, despite all of his culinary mishaps, the man makes the best mashed potatoes and gravy EVER.

  • http://www.peerpressureworks.com Cliff

    And the yorkshire puddings are pretty damn good, too. He should stick with things like that, and large cuts of meat…hams and beef roasts. He does that stuff well. :)

   
© 2012 Peer Pressure Works! Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha