Patsy Porco

Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Secret Ingredients

In Food, Humor on August 27, 2022 at 12:23 am

Cooking is dangerous. I burn my arms in the oven and my hands on the pots. I invariably grate my fingernails along with the cheese, and sometimes it’s hard to avoid dripping blood from a cut finger into my ingredients. I always cut my finger when I’m chopping vegetables.

Maybe I have so many accidents because I don’t like cooking. I have a friend who finds the prep work therapeutic and the cooking satisfying. I think she might have a mental problem.

I’ve been using meal kits recently. I usually order three meals per week and wing it the rest of the week. I really like having all of the ingredients and recipes on hand. The kits are expensive but you can’t put a price on not having to shop or plan meals. Well, you can, actually. It’s about $40 for a meal for four, which feeds three quite nicely. That’s approximately $13 per meal, which is reasonable enough, but I still have to feed my family the other four days, so what’s the point?

I’ve tried three different meal kit services. The third one was the best. It had top-notch ingredients and delicious recipes … and a hefty price tag. The first one was bargain basement. The meals were good, but inexpensive vegetables were commonly used, and one can only eat so much zucchini. The recipes were exotic, though, which was nice … occasionally. There were lots of noodle and rice bowls with fried eggs on top. I never understood the fried eggs. The second kit I tried was a disaster. The packers threw all of the ingredients into the box willy nilly, and the produce rarely survived the trip from the warehouse to my house without wilting or rotting. Worst of all, there were no recipe cards. I had to get the recipes online. Have you ever tried cooking a complicated meal while reading the recipe from your laptop or phone? My laptop would go into sleep mode constantly so I was always pressing the cursor pad with greasy fingers to bring the screen back. Grease-covered computer keys are not covered under my warranty.

I suppose I’ll go back to grocery shopping and meal planning. I’ll have to stop off at the pharmacy first, though, for Band-Aids … and a nail file.

Can you find the fingernail?

A Big Plate of Grease

In food, Food, Humor, Irish Breakfast on January 4, 2016 at 1:02 am

irish-breakfast-large-plate-17585745We went to brunch with our friends today at an Irish pub/sports bar. It was unnerving to be talking quietly among ourselves and then to suddenly have everyone else in the place jump to their feet, shouting and backslapping. It wasn’t as if you could prepare yourself for these outbursts because, football being football, anything can happen at any time.

That wasn’t the worst part of the experience, though. I ordered the “Irish Breakfast.” It sounded so ethnic and charming, and whenever I had read about this breakfast in novels, I vowed to order it sometime. I had hoped to be in Ireland when I did, but I was in Norwalk, CT, and it was offered, so I ordered it. Baked beans are included in the breakfast, and that sounded exotic, too, even though I had read that many people (mostly older people, I think) in Boston eat baked beans on toast for breakfast. I reasoned that they got the habit from their English-Irish ancestors, so it still qualified as being “foreign.”

I was pleased with my adventurous eating … until the dish arrived. What was delivered to me was plate of greasy sausage, shriveled ham, two over-easy eggs, cooked tomatoes, mushrooms, and a small bowl of lukewarm baked beans. There were also two slices of “pudding.” The pudding wasn’t what we consider pudding to be; it was sausage. I ordered the white pudding, because I knew the black pudding was composed mostly of blood. Even though the white pudding wasn’t made of blood, it had a tangy taste that made me think that it might have been made of another bodily fluid. One bite was enough.

“This is a plate of grease!” I said to my friend.

“It’s an Irish Breakfast,” she said, surprised at my surprise. “You do know that it’s called the ‘hangover breakfast,’ don’t you?”

“No!” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Yes,” she said. “Greasy food is good for people with hangovers.”

“I’m not hungover,” I said. “So, this is just disgusting.”

“Well, there aren’t many carbs,” she said. “That’s a benefit of the Irish Breakfast.”

Maybe there weren’t many carbs in the meal, but I’d need to eat a loaf of bread to sop up the grease, which would negate any benefits of this awful meal.

One thing I learned today was to stop romanticizing foreign food. If I ever get to England, I will not order “Bubble and Squeak” or “Toad in the Hole,” until I see what those dishes are composed of.

 

Photo credit: ID 17585745 © Jörg Beuge | Dreamstime.com

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