I learned from the movie Big Trouble in Little China that the Chinese have a lot of hells. The Hell of the Upside-Down Swimmers, the Hell of Being Boiled Alive, and so forth. Maybe I shouldn't trust movies so much. The movie might not be such an authentic guide to Chinese culture, considering that at one point it has a Japanese guy, speaking Japanese, pretending to be a Chinese guy speaking Chinese. That's fair to moderately shameful, unless John Carpenter is trying to tell us something.
But let's pretend that the Chinese have a lot of hells anyway. To them must be added a new one, the Hell of Really Early Morning Paid Programming. I woke up this morning well before dawn and ended up staring listlessly at the TV as spasms racked my esophagus (apparently another treat brought to me by chemotherapy, a conclusion I reach because the spasms started the same time chemo started). First it was a bunch of commercials for various forms of make-up, all of which made really quite remarkable claims. This stuff will do everything! It'll cover your acne! It'll cover your unsightly gunshot wound scars! It'll transform your life! It'll inhibit beta decay in the atomic nucleus! It'll reverse aging and raise the dead! It'll make you an even more vapid narcissist than you were before! Then it was a bunch of commercials for various weight loss programs, all of which made really quite remarkable claims. This program will do everything! It'll make (make, mind you; we're not fooling around here) you lose weight! It'll give you a better hairstyle! It'll make you taller! It'll give you better taste in clothing! It'll turn you into what Jesse The Body Ventura once called a sexual Tyrannosaurus! Then it was a food processor gadget, which made really quite remarkable claims. It'll make a hyooge salad in just 38 milliseconds! It'll solve Fermat's Last Theorem without recourse to the modularity conjecture! It'll convert some rubbery, nasty organism we found in a brackish tidepool into something you'd actually want to eat! It'll warm the hearts of crotchety old farts and make you into a culinary hero!
I don't really like olive oil. I live in mortal terror of a cooking show where they cook asparagus and some icky bivalve in a bunch of olive oil. Ugh. Why not put a few road apples and cow pies in there too while you're at it?
Subaru. Love. Yes, I do. I love the commercial where Action Executive picks up the cabbie and proceeds to turn some quiet residential street into his own private race track, startling the cabbie at first before pleasing him. I'd like to see the residents come out of their dwellings, shoot out the tires, and then beat Action Executive to death with rolling pins and hockey sticks. That'll teach you to endanger everyone by treating our quiet residential street as your own private test track, you pompous yuppie bastard. Maybe next time you'll slow down! There won't be a next time, of course, because they've beaten him to death, but you get my drift. (Maybe they should offer an Action Executive action figure. One hand could be specially molded to grip his Action Executive Blackberry; the other to grip his Action Executive Enormous Genitals. Then they could sell a cowboy action figure who could sit on a fence and roll his eyes at the stupendous self-absorption of Action Executive.)
Every now and then the Barefoot Contessa gets around to a show where she says something like "I know my friend is having a hard day, so I thought I'd make him dinner." His "hard day" happens to consist of having to deliver two orders for cut flowers, which doesn't seem all that hard to me. Why doesn't she have friends who have hard days on the order of working a twelve-hour shift in a steel mill? Because there aren't any steel mills in the Hamptons, I guess. The Hamptons must be wildly posh if delivering two batches of flowers counts as a hard day. Heaven forbid anyone should stub their toe; the whole fricking neighborhood would show up with hot dishes to console the poor bastard. How come Ina Garten doesn't cook for me when I'm having a hard day, such as Day Four of a brutal five-day chemotherapy course? Huh?? How about some home-made macaroni and cheese for me, huh? Oh, never mind; she'd just put arthropods in it and ruin it for me anyway.
Or the commercials that depict ordinary things as tasks of almost insuperable difficulty; I always like those. The woman who collapses in exhaustion after peeling three and a half potatoes. Nobody is saying that peeling potatoes is fun, but gee whiz, lady, if peeling three and a half potatoes pushes you to the breaking point, you may need to toughen up just a bit. Or the woman who has a conniption fit because the strain of taking one birth control pill a day crushes her soul and causes the sound track of her life to warble. The poor dear. What if she had to take two pills a day, or flush her central venous line once a day? Is brushing her teeth once a day too much for her too? If so, maybe they should invent a ring that goes in her mouth and bleaches her teeth.
I saw an infomercial for some make-up product called "Meaningful Beauty." What the hell does that mean? Does that mean that all this time we've been pursuing Meaningless Beauty? And what exactly does a "beauty consultant" do? Sit at a desk and look at photographs of things and decide if they're beautiful or not? "Landfill? Not beautiful. Snow-covered mountains? Beautiful. New Jersey? Iffy either way." How does one get that gig?
Last night I watched Good Eats and actually saw Alton Brown use an old-style oil can to squirt some olive oil into a pan. That's just a tad too precious, even for me. He always makes a tedious amateur thespian production out of his rants about uni-taskers, but there he is putting olive oil in a goddamned oil pump can, which is a uni-tasker if I've ever seen one (unless he puts a little thirty-weight in the same can to oil bike chains and the Tin Man when I'm not watching, which I doubt).
Oh, look, another cooking show with the "elite dinner party" theme, showing all these elite stylish people eating elite stylish food and drinking elite stylish wine while the host holds forth on the elite stylishness of the stuff he cooked. How come they never do cooking shows about a bunch of people eating chili dogs while watching a rodeo on TV? Because there aren't any rodeos in Beverly Hills, Napa Valley, or the Hamptons, I guess - let alone chili dogs. The elite food police have special equipment that can detect the characteristic sound of cans of chili being opened, and then they break down your door and send you to a food re-education camp until you admit that, yes, truffle oil really is next to Godliness.
I think my blood sugar must be low. Time to go get out the oil can, some arthropods, and the magical TV food processor and make breakfast, because delivering all these flowers is really going to hurt.
Is That All?
11 years ago
10 comments:
If I cook, I'd make you some homemade mac and cheese. If I say so myself, my version rocks.
I bet it does! I make a lot of mac and cheese out of boxes because it's easy, it's warm, and it's reasonably comforting, but I imagine mac and cheese made with real cheese instead of that strange fluorescent orange powder WOULD rock.
It's ridiculously easy to make, and of course mine is a little different every time because I use whatever cheese happens to be hanging out in the frig. It makes Michael a little crazy because I never write anything down, so I can never duplicate it . . . . But I write stuff down all day long, it's my job. When I start cooking, the last thing I want to do is write stuff down.
I understand that perfectly. I used to be a hobbyist programmer - I'd come home from work and tinker with computer programs, just for fun. Then when I got job writing computer programs, I discovered that it just wasn't any fun to fiddle with them at home any more. So I took up gardening instead.
I've never made mac and cheese from scratch, but it seems to me that any cheese would work, though maybe not the really stinky ones. Then again, how many times in the last decade have I actually had Stilton in my fridge?
I once made mac and cheese with brie, which was amazing. Never did it again, just because I don't often have brie hanging around in the frig. Probably my favorite combo is parmesan, white cheddar, and just a little goat cheese. There's a local dairy here that makes goat cheese--it's pretty good.
My aunt used to make goat cheese at home. It took a bit of getting used to, but eventually I quite liked it. Goat meat, on the other hand, was something I never really got used to.
But parmesan, white cheddar and a touch of goat cheese, that would work for me. If I hadn't already gorged on KFC I would be salivating.
Of course the cheese doesn't really matter. The butter and heavy cream are what floats that boat.
Sorry I missed this gem on the day it was written! HI-larious, I have to say. Sorry to say I love cooking shows--even Ina Garten. For blue collar chili dog fests try Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives on Food Network, or Man V. Food... can't remember the channel. You'll like Man V. Food.
I like most of the cooking shows on the Food Network. I like them even more now that I'm back at work and am not watching them every single day and slowly coming to blame Tyler and Guy and Ina for the fact that I was slowly going stir-crazy.
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