Kitchen and Cooking Tips for People Who Don’t Seem to Know Anything About Either Thing – An Introduction
Upon stumbling across the wastelands of the internet, where the signal to noise ratio is quite high, why in god’s name would you stop here? Furthermore, why would anyone read a another fucking lifestyle, “look-at-me-I-can-do-stuff” blog? Because, frankly, I have known too many people that I have had to explain this shit. I think cooking and preparing food is its own reward. What else can I say? There is definitely a feeling that has been going around for the last 40 years that somehow cooking food is hard, time consuming and takes some special aptitude. Let’s get real here, it’s fucking cooking. If you can read and follow directions, you can cook. If you have even the most basic of kitchen implements, you can cook. Basically, most of this blog is going to be a navel gazing ego trip. Welcome, and get on board! I should dispense with all of the “I want to help people” garbage because that’s not exactly where I am coming from. Basically, this is the Big Complain, or the Unwarranted Conniption Fit. There is a specific inspiration here and I’ll get to that but, I should lay out my story so you can get an idea of what the fuck this bullshit “lifestyle” blog is going to be about.
A couple of years ago, I went back to my family’s lake cabin to find that the geniuses had stripped decades of seasoning off a vintage cast iron pan. If you know where this is going, than you might find this stuff sort of funny from a “been there, felt that” kind of way. Anyways, upon having dinner with my partner at my cousin’s house later, I found out that it was my aunt, who is in her 70s by the way, who had scoured that beautiful pan all the way down to the raw iron. What the fuck, aunt Chrissy? I said silently. I then went on to extoll the virtues of maintaining cast iron and why that pan was particularly special, blah, blah, blah. Well, I don’t know about your extended family, but I have the sense that when I start to speak about something that I know more about than them, they assume I am just being unnecessarily know-it-all-ish. I mean, that’s my theory. They seem to tune out my recommendations for kitchen things. Perhaps because they have never eaten any of the few things I make like a boss. On the other hand, it could be that they just don’t give a shit. Ah ha! That’s it! They just don’t care. Perfect.
Note: it is interesting how people stop listening to you when they don’t care what you are saying. It’s as if when you open your mouth a stream of pink noise replaces every syllable. I have noticed this many times back in my dating days, when I would initially begin a story and wander so far off the track of the original post that I start talking about how the Perseid meteor shower is caused by the Swift-Tuttle comet that passes us every 130.26 years, or something and… where was I? Right.
So yeah, whomever was on the receiving end of this would obviously check out early. I know this because somewhere around when I pivoted from my taste for bourbon, to how many dry counties there still are in Kentucky, to this time I met this scary biker guy from the south and challenged me to challenge him for his profligate use of the N-word (“I betcha ya don’t like word, do you?” “You’re right, I don’t”), they checked their phone, excused themselves to the bathroom, returned and paid half the tab and left. Nonetheless, somehow I convinced someone to marry me despite…. Shit, you see, I am doing it again. Back to the story at hand.
Angry as I was about the pan, I wrote a note to my family and left it posted above the oven. It read:
“Care for Cast Iron
- Rinse pan with warm water
- Wipe clean with paper towel to dry
- Drizzle 1 Tbsp oil on pan and use paper towel to coat ENTIRE pan
- For caked on food, scour w/ kosher salt and oil and repeat steps 1 – 3
NEVER EVER
1. Use soap, detergent, steel wool, borax, Bon Ami, Comet, or any other cleaning agent other than the methods above. You will ruin the pan.
This was two years ago. Last summer I decided that they would never care for the vintage family cast iron pans and/or follow these simple, clear directions. In short, I saved them and I left my modern Lodge cast iron pan instead. I had spent years seasoning that pan as well but, it was less special to me. I figured since I had verbally instructed them what to do and written a slightly passively aggressive note, that that would be adequate. Hahahaha! No. Fast forward to this summer. I returned after their most recent trip and low and behold: they had scrubbed the pan in places down to the raw iron again AND the bottom of it was rusting. Holy fuck!
Ok, so once again, let me reiterate the fact that if you are half as fucking mad reading about that as I am just remembering it, than this is the bullshit “lifestyle” blog for you! It’s also the blog for you if you don’t know why any of the aforementioned is important or worth having a mini tantrum, a… mantrum, if you will.
Get ready for a lot of talk about cast iron, carbon steel pans and shit you may or may not need. I’ll try my best to reveal how to read. A recipe, that is. Hell, I’ll even present some of my own. Prepare yourself for a whole host of obvious biases, strong opinions, profanity, booze and pointless meandering and name calling.