Tuesday, March 17, 2009

What's Cookin?

Well, folks, I decided to channel my inner Mad Men-50's-housewife and cook today. I was making meatballs with pine nuts and golden raisins From Scratch. Okaaaay. How did it go? The good news is they tasted great. The bad news is that it took me HOURS to make them. Not because the recipe itself is complicated and necessitating hours of cooking. Nope. Just because I am lacking in basic kitchen technique, which is exacerbated by being knife-phobic. I cut myself all the time. Any random cooking event with me turns into that knight scene from The Holy Grail, where his arms are spurting blood and he's yelling, "It's just a flesh wound!" I am the reason Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle: you don't want my body parts in your food! So: one medium onion = 20 minutes to "chop finely." Twenty. Then forget mixing the stuff together with the turkey meat, because having my hands in raw meat nauseates me. So I was dithering all around it with a plastic fork because all my other forks were in the dishwasher being washed at that exact moment. Add another 20 minutes. Then sauteeing the onion till translucent but not colored: What? you want me to WATCH a sautee pan as it cooks? Apparently so. Man, this is a fucking CHORE! Who does this?! Finally I get all the stuff in the meat and fork it around, then realize that I cannot form the meatballs because that would require me to put my hands in the raw meat! At that point, an hour had passed and I called the BBDD to tell him dinner was ready, except for the making of the actual balls, the actual frying of the actual balls, the actual placing of the actual fried balls in the sauce, and the actual full cooking of the actual balls in the sauce.

He's a smart man, so he simply said, "That's great!"

4 comments:

Just Vegas said...

I love homemade meatballs but I have never made them after the first time I tried.
But I do make meatloaf and may I suggest latex gloves? I keep a box of medical gloves in the cabinet.

Anonymous said...

oh yeah....
http://www.nothingbuthardware.com/808629.html

Utah Savage said...

I'm glad you're cooking, but don't stop blogging just because it takes you ten hours to make roast chicken (latex glove suggestion is great).

Joe Tornatore said...

girl we got to get you a food processor.