Recently, I was asked to participate in a gay-men's recipe exchange. And this terrified me. I imagined hyper-competent gay men all over America, dicing and slicing and also preparing some kind of compote and maybe a jus.
This is not how I cook. If I were honest, I would tell you this about food preparation.
(1) Make sure the recipe has fewer than five ingredients. With the measurements, just sort of let your eyes slide over the numbers...and hope some kind of osmosis process is happening.....because you will not be referring back to the measurements.
(2) People say that small children really like textures that bring back memories of baby food: yogurts, creamy sauces, butter and noodles. These foods don't require a great deal of work: You can wolf the stuff down, you don't really have to chew, and then you can go back to staring at your phone. I have not outgrown this phase. I like to eat quickly, without effort, and I find that eating quickly means that you can eat MORE, and eating MORE means you don't have to think about various existential crises for at least five to ten minutes. So I like my meat braised, beaten and beaten and beaten to death in a Crock Pot, so that I don't really have to chew.
(3) Prepare the thing in the Crock Pot. While you toss salt in there, be sure you have your phone tuned to a grizzly true crime podcast. I prefer Crime Junkie, where two midwestern white ladies spout out plagiarized theories about various crimes. For the first several months, no one called them on their plagiarism, but then I think maybe a lawsuit happened, because the more-recent episodes have many new dangling modifiers: "Borrowing from Barbara Walters, on the November 10th, 1989 episode of Brutal Slayings...." I miss the older episodes.
(4) As you squeeze ketchup over your frozen meatballs, your infant son will grow fussy. If you sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," with exaggerated calm, this will generally help. Your son will actually pause in his crying and get a look of fascination in his eyes, i.e. "Oh, man, I'd better be quiet so I don't miss any of this." If you sing gently enough, you can still hear the ladies on Crime Junkie, murmuring some nonsense about how maybe Lizzie Borden really didn't murder her father.
(5) That's actually all I have to say about cooking. The "recipe" I submitted to my exchange was for a caprese "salad," and basically I said: Put some tomatoes in a bowl with cheese, and that's your dish. I sent off the recipe, and no one ever replied. I choose not to read anything--anything!--into this silence.
Enjoy your kitchen.
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