The Blogging Affairs Desk

Disclaimer: Ang wants me to say that she makes me dinner from scratch “all the time.”  She does not like how this article reflects the idea she hardly ever cooks.

With that said, on to the article.

Ninety-nine percent of my life, I’ve eaten like most every other American who wakes up on American soil, drives listlessly to work, and ponders life’s great meaning.  And that would mean I eat out of a box.

Think about the meals you consume and unless you either live on a farm or are Giada De Laurentis, you eat out of a fucking box.  The box is the old/new feed bag for Americans, and it wasn’t until the other night that I came to loathe the chains that bound me for the last twenty-seven sum-odd years.

I can’t really blame my upbringing on the fact that I’ve never really ventured further in my diet than something pre-made, designed to taste awesome, and be loaded with so many calories that no one, not even an Olympian mid training could ever possibly burn off.  My mom didn’t really “cook” for me in the traditional sense.  Up until the other night when Ang and I literally slaved over a hot stove to make dinner, I had never made something from “scratch.”  I thought I had once, blueberry muffins that we had to make in middle school cooking class, but then I realized that I think to speed up the process of 12 year olds banging pots and pans together, the decrepit old bag of a teacher, some product of a failed vault towards something professionally culinary, popped a few Klonopins and gave us the pre-mixed shit.

No, mom never cooked from scratch, but that doesn’t mean she was a bad cook or that I hold it against her.  At a young age she got her proverbial dick stomped by her entire family (aunts and uncles too) when she tried to make a home-made pasta dinner for everyone in order to get a Home-Ec badge for the girl scouts.  Apparently the pasta didn’t come out just perfect, so everyone around the table, in their traditional French Canadian ways, berated the 9 year girl about her lack of prowess in the kitchen.

So mom stuck with simply reading instructions off the backs of boxes which didn’t amount much more to “pre heat oven to 350, put mix into plate, set for twenty minutes, let stand and cool for five before serving.”

So yeah, I didn’t know what else was out there.

So Ang got this wild hair up her ass at some point and decided she was sick and tired of my ignorance when it came to “good food.”  Admittedly, my idea of “good food” was something out of a “fancy” box.  No, Ang wanted to make an entire dinner from scratch, with all wholesome ingredients, not unlike how the goddamn Amish do it.

I should point out too, that seldom do the two of us ever get along in the kitchen at the same time.  This is because when it comes to organization, reading instructions, following instructions, patience, and everything else that comes into play that relates to an individuals personality regarding cooking, we’re completely the opposite.

Ang won’t wait for the oven to be fully pre-heated, for instance.  I’m usually too concerned about the dishes.  I want to read the directions very carefully multiple times ahead of time, Ang tends to breeze over them and wing it.  So on, so forth.

So the two of us in the kitchen, at the same time, making a meal from scratch has the potential to become very explosive, heated, and dangerous, once you’ve added to the fact that we keep about a thousand knives bolted to the wall over the sink.  Can we do it?  Read on.

It turned out rather well, actually.  The meal we chose was a somewhat healthy ground turkey meatloaf, with au gratin potatoes with a strawberry-rhubarb crumble for dessert.  Everything to be made from scratch, and that means nothing artificial or out of a fucking box.  Even the whip cream for the crumble was made from scratch.

The place got hot real quick.  We were constantly standing over each other, trying to take turns with the cook book, working off of recipes ridiculously spread apart from each other that we had to use kitchen utensils as book marks.  We also have no real counter space, so all the prep was being done on our small pub-style table, the chairs, the sink, the stove top.

Every ten minutes we had to stop and do the dishes just so we could make room in the sink, as well as re-use the same dishes again, such as the deep bowl for mixing both the ground turkey and the crumble crust part of the pie.

It took nearly two hours from start to finish, with the meat loaf (which will serve 8 people mind you) coming out first, and the potatoes coming out last, the pie in the middle, which was fine since it had to cool.

The result?  I was impressed beyond belief, especially since I was skeptical about the ground turkey as a substitute for regular hamburger in the meat loaf.  What I did notice however was how… for lack of a better word….   organic everything tasted.

When you buy something prepackaged out of a box, it always tastes bangin’.  That’s because it’s loaded with sugars, additives, preservatives, etc that are designed to make it tasty, so the consumer will want to buy the product again when he or she travels back to the local food market.  With the meal from scratch, you don’t really have all that other added in shit, so it tastes good, but not in that hypnotic sense that makes you crave for it again.

Quite simply put, it was good the way good is supposed to be.  Plus, we have leftovers for the next couple of days, apparently.

This doesn’t mean we’re going “off the box” by any means.  Given the amount of effort we both put in (Ang, I think put in a little bit more, but that’s ok) I can reasonably see us doing something like this again once a week, but not more.  By the end of the cooking, we were both almost too tired to eat the food.  I can still see us getting a frozen pizza and throwing it from the freezer into the oven every once in a while when neither one of us feels like spending a bunch of time working out a meal.

I call frozen pizzas “get out of cooking free cards.”