cooking misadventures continued

Because I'm busy writing 2 novels and watching tv, I haven't updated this blog in almost a month. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, at my own apparent disregard of proper protocols, and I resolve to attempt to do better. I have a series of posts in mind.

This happened a few years ago when my wife went with her tai chi group to China. It was too expensive for me to tag along just so she'd have a roommate, so I stayed at home with our dog. Now that I was on my own, I realized that I could cook and eat the wonderful piece of venison we'd been given by a guy we let hunt on our property.

So in the late afternoon I removed the package from the freezer. It was wrapped in clear paper, a long thin strip. I got out the wok and threw in some butter and added the "venison" (those quotes are the first clue that something was wrong...).

A few minutes later I looked inside the wok and saw the sizzling stuff MELTING!. Not spose to happen to venison.

Long story short: I had grabbed instead of the strip of venison a strip of dark chocolate we had gotten from somewhere.

Nice ending, though. After it cooled, I was able to chip away the chocolate and ate it over several days.
Then I cooked the venison properly.

RIP Julia Child! (great movie, by the way)...

My Souper Soup

Back in the Sixties, my wife and I worked for Time-Life Books. I was assigned to the Foods of the World series, a subject about which I knew nothing except which fork to use to eat. I was in charge of assigning photography for certain books.

In the text of one book, about French Provincial cooking, I read a phrase about “...a pot of soup kept on the back of the stove.” It made my mouth water.

I decided just before Christmas and New Year, that I would make a star-kissed bean soup. We bought bags of dry beans and one evening I added them one by one along with a ham bone and chicken stock, to a big pot and cooked them up into a great-smelling pot of super soup. 

And, after cooking to delicious perfection, I pushed the pot to the back of the stove. Of course, as I later realized, the text in the cookbook referred to country stoves, which always had a flame going. 

Next day, Penny’s parents were due in town from New Jersey and I wanted to feed them my great soup so they’d stop believing that I was an idiot.

I rushed in after work and pulled the pot to the front burner, turned on the flame and took off the lid to stir it. But before my wooden spoon entered... there was a burp within the soup; a bubble appeared.

“Hmm,” I said. No idiot I. I mentioned it to Penny, who also said, “Hmm,” and then added that she was going to call an expert, a woman we worked with who worked in the kitchen to test recipes for the books.

The woman, Fifi, was ill with flu and her husband shouted to her from the phone that our bean soup had bubbled before the fire could heat it.

Penny could hear Fifi shout back from her sickbed: “No STOP! IT’S PTOMAINE!”

I flushed the entire pot into the NYC sewer system. I hope I wasn’t responsible for poisoning the fish in the Hudson. Since then I’ve never attempted to cook anything more complex than scrambled eggs.