I’m a single man, slouching in my one bedroom apartment just fending for myself. This affects my home life in many ways. I can pee with the bathroom door open. I have a huge clothes hamper: the entire bedroom. My old Transformers are acceptable as decorative “knick-knacks”. It also means that I’m on my own where meals are concerned. Since most of my dinners are the sort whose preparation involves poking a hole in the protective film to let it vent during microwaving, this is only a problem on those rare occasions when I feel compelled to actually cook. Andy cooking, you see, is a dark event; an apocalyptic nightmare – foretold in bleak forgotten texts – whose coming tolls with somber, dissonant bells the sorrow of all those unfortunate enough to bear witness.
I know a lot of people say they’re bad cooks, but most of them are just being modest. Not me. I have the cooking skills of a banana slug and should never, ever attempt it…not ever. Like crossing the streams or touching your mirror-universe self, it is Bad and should never be allowed to happen. The threat of dirty dishes afterwards used to be enough to hold me in check, but now that I have a dishwasher, I sometimes fold to temptation and try it anyway.
Allow me to take you back, backwards across the shadowed misty plains of time, all the way to last night. I went to the supermarket to pick up more meals to cook up with that secret homestyle technique that Mom taught me…all 1100 watts of it. Along the way I spotted a package of pepperoni- and mozzarella-stuffed tortellinis, and that’s where my troubles began. Hey, those look tasty, don’t they? said the Devil on my left shoulder. But you have to cook them, and you know that’s evil and wrong! said the Angel on my right. Fuck off, you pansy-ass Angel, snapped the Devil, and I nodded in spellbound agreement.
As my fingers touched the package, somewhere, Emeril Lagasse sat bolt upright and said with a faraway stare, “I sense a great disturbance in the Force.”
I returned home and set down my purchases, and as I read the package, my first mistake occurred to me: I had forgotten to buy sauce! No matter…I’d butter the tortellinis, and they’d still be tasty. I put a pot of water on to boil and covered it. Wow, I thought, this is the furthest I’ve ever gotten without screwing up! When the water burbled at a nice high rolling boil, I added the pasta. The pot was a bit small and I had to take a bunch of the water out, but so what? I looked at the clock and made a note to take the pot off the stove in ten minutes.
Thirteen minutes later, the air in my apartment was split by the piercing cry of the smoke detector. I scrambled to the kitchen, and as I ran toward the smoking pasta, I slid on a puddle of water which had spouted from the pot onto the floor and smacked my pinky toe into the range. Quickly I removed the pot and placed it in the sink. It was full of cooked tortellinis: cooked, dry tortellinis which, in the absence of the water that had boiled completely away, were burning against the inside of the pot.
Pasta safely off the burner, I rushed over to the smoke detector and waved my hands beneath it, trying desperately to shut it up. The smoke was too thick for this to work, so I went for the floor fan, turned it on and aimed it up at the ceiling. While the fan did its thing, I ran back into the kitchen, not sure what to do next. There was water on the floor and I’d somehow spilled sauce on the floor as well, and the pasta was still burning in the pot. I tore some paper towels from the roll and dropped them on the water puddle to soak up, then fumbled in a cabinet for the colander and emptied the tortellinis into it. The furious beeping of the smoke detector ceased, and I ran for the computer and sat long enough to type a hurried apology to the friend I’d been chatting with. I then returned, flustered, to the kitchen once again.
Brow creased in frustrated humiliation, I surveyed the crash scene. Some of the pasta was burnt, but it was mostly salvageable. The alarm had finally been silenced. The sauce would have to be cleaned up, but the water was being absorbed by the wad of paper towels I’d hastily deposited on the floor. As I stared in dismay at the large gooey red drops all over the kitchen floor, I slowly remembered what you have probably been thinking already: I didn’t buy any sauce. For the first time I became aware of my throbbing pinky toe and realized that it was oozing large amounts of blood all over the floor!
The good news is that blood is easy to clean off of linoleum. The bad news is that it’s not so easy to clean off of carpeting, which I’d traveled across to get the fan and to run to the computer. So the next task was to grab a towel and cold water and scrub every one of my crimson footprints before they could set in. I took a good amount of time and care in doing so, and managed to leave not a mark remaining. Then I returned to the kitchen and dealt with the water and blood there. In the end, miraculously, no lasting damage was left in my wake. A few organized cleanup and rebuilding efforts later, I got to enjoy my plump and buttery – if somewhat crispy – pepperoni and mozzarella tortellinis, and they were actually pretty tasty, just as I’d hoped.
What does the future hold for Chef Andy? Well, I really believe that this marks a turning point in my culinary career. I certainly got a lot out of this experience: I learned from my mistakes, and I fully understand all the things I did wrong. As a result, I think that the next time I decide to cook, the lessons that last night’s adventure taught me will allow me – competently, skillfully, and without any major disasters – to call for delivery.
