Dear Doug: Letters From God
I’m not one to brag but I have a pretty good relationship with God. Over the years we have gotten pretty close and have had some pretty lively conversations about various subjects including Modern cinema vs old-time cinema, the wonders of condensed soup, and why people set a box of tissues by the rear window of their cars when they clearly won’t be able to reach them when they need one. The big man upstairs is always sending me emails, normally consisting of forwards of good Irish jokes or pictures of puppies, but today I got one from him that was a bit more serious. I think I should share it with you.
Dear Doug,
Could you please use your well read blog/website to let the masses know that their want for living forever is really screwing up my plans. Humankind wasn’t supposed to make it past 50 because let’s face facts, if you haven’t done it by then, it ain’t getting done. I tolerated humans living to 55 and even 60 telling myself it was only a phase like bell bottoms and Facebook status updates. But now Doug, they are pushing me by trying to live forever by eating things that weren’t meant to be eaten. I gave you oil to fry in and grain to make into a nice flour breading. I never said for those dimwits to eat seaweed. Animals are there for 3 reasons; riding, petting, and eating. These health nuts who want to outlive the sun are screwing things up by eating things that aren’t food. Whats next on the progressive dinner from hell, Tree Bark and lilly pads?? Nimrods! I’m just going to have to ramp up the amount of random deaths to handle these “Live Forever” freaks. The next person who eats seaweed gets run over by an ice cream truck.
Fry on!
God
P.s. I’ve attached a Groupon for a massage at Helen of Troys. Go with the Heavenly Hands package as its pretty damn close!
Live Fast, Fry Young, and Leave a Grease Splattered Corpse
It is always a bit awkward when my job is to keep people in shape but I have a secret. A secret so golden brown and deep-fried that it could ruin me and my career in the fitness world. It all started some years ago when I was on a trip down south and by complete chance was introduced to my soul mate, Chicken Fried Steak. That delightful temptress seduced me with her taste that is, with any shadow of doubt, indisputable proof of a loving God. I spent the next few years living with only the memories of our fateful meeting because our love was not meant to be for I…I am a Northerner and she is a Southern Gal. we would meet occasionally for dinner while i was on vacation but it was always slightly awkward for my family was there so our relationship was kept at a professional level and survived on a stolen glance here and a gentle kiss there.
We would go months without seeing each other until one fateful day; the day I bought a deep fryer. We have never been separated since and though our love must be kept quiet from the rest of the world, I know there is only one food for me, Chicken Fried Steak. She is my soul food.
I’m well aware that she is shortening my life but what kind of life ignores the fried food group? The Fried Food Group was given to us by the Great Frying God as proof that humankind was meant to enjoy life and not stay around too long. Let’s face facts; people over 80 rarely contribute much to society outside of confusion and never-ending stories of olden days. You should think of Chicken Fried Steak like a great friend in Vegas. She drops you off, makes sure you have a great time, and it handles getting you the hell out before you’re useless.
Abe Lincoln said “It’s not the years in the life but the life in the years”. Eating seaweed and living to 100 has no appeal to me. Live fast, Fry young, and leave a grease splattered corpse.
Sizzle On Bitches.
Living and Frying in 3/4 Time: Random Thoughts from a Man’s Kitchen
I’m a man. I have a man’s stove. What that means is that my stove has 2 settings; Off and Inferno. I have never truly understood the idea of putting something on the stove and walking away after you set the temperature to Dog’s Nose so it can cook longer than the gestation of a Naked Mole Rat. I’m going to die someday and I’d like to get in as many meals as possible so therefore I’m either frying or I’m dying.
Cavemen are great. Not only do they invent fire but they also invented grilling and probably all in the same day. They realized that hot food tastes better than raw food and since they had to eat their Brontosaurus burgers fast before something else came and ate them and their burgers, they cooked over the hottest flames available at the time. The first caveman to suggest that they slow down the cooking process got left behind to find out what the digestive track of a sabre tooth tiger looks like.
I can’t comprehend instructions like Bring To A Boil Over Medium Heat. Why? I live in a very modern world that allows me leisure time not enjoyed by my forefathers. They had to start cooking lunch at 4:30 in the morning if they wanted to eat by 12:00. I, being a man of modern times, can wait until the last second before I open the microwave door and ignore the defrosting instructions as I cook a chicken breast with a blast of dimly light magic that I can’t understand and frankly, don’t need to. I don’t even truly understand why my microwave has power settings. I just want one called Solar Flare. That’s all I need. Every meal would take no longer than a Cialis commercial to cook. I don’t live in the Old Country folks and I’ve got other ways to kill time besides waiting for water to come to a medium boil. What I really need is a giant incinerator that I can slide a non-stick cooking pan into. I’d have a four course meal done in seconds and without the ever-present fear of undercooked meat.
Why doesn’t Food Network have a show called Caveman Cuisine? It could be just a few guys around a fire grunting and staring into the flames. The show wouldn’t need to be longer than 3 minutes if the fire is hot enough. The show would revolve around 3 instructions: Put food on fire, Watch Food, Take food off fire. Simple. They could also have a show called Fryday which would be all about frying everything you can. Fryday could be followed 2 days later by Sundae, which would invent all new ways to make sundaes. If I were in charge (Hint!) I’d throw in small segments during the week called Mondae, Tuesdae, Wednesdae, and so on. Every day is Sundae!
The Ninth Baking Ring of Hell
Attempted Creation?
Key Lime Divinity Pie
Chance of Disaster? Have you ever seen a Wily Coyote cartoon? My baking equipment came in an ACME box. There has never, in the history of mankind, been a greater chance of disaster. A beaver would have a better chance of running for congress using the slogan “vote for a real dam man” then I will at making this pie. You might say that I have a bad attitude about it and that’s not helping me become a great home chef but, I’d be happy to tell you that unless I meet a small magical cricket that wears a top hat and he gives me one wish and I suddenly transform into Emeril Lagasse, this is going to get ugly like an old painting of inbred hill folk.
Anything Odd Happen While Baking? A Priest came to my front door and slapped my face and then proceeded to drench me with Holy Water and yell at the top of his lungs “The power of Christ compels you…to stop baking! The power of Christ compels you… to stop Baking!” He then turned and ran into the neighborhood warning the God fearing neighbors that the devil had taken pie form.
S.A.T Fill in the Blank Question- I am to baking what _____ is to plumbing? Answer- Paper Mache
Aftermath? I am currently being sued by Sara Lee and the Bakers Union for Key Limeicide and impersonating a Baker.
What Went Wrong? Well, after conferring with some friends I have discovered the one thing I really did wrong was turning to the Key Lime Divinity Pie recipe page in the book and trying to have a go at it. I have also discovered there are other ways to spell disaster; Dougmakingapie being one of them.
I think though, the main problem is that I’m a man and as a man my stove has 2 settings off and inferno. There is no warm romantic evening fire setting. In my head nothing will cook unless it’s under a flamethrower. If the instructions say bring to a boil it clearly means turn stove on high and wait. Be clear people! It should say turn stove to medium. Grab war and peace and read to the halfway point then take a 20 minute nap. When you awake refreshed it will be 4 more hours. I don’t know about you but I live in the year 2011, not 1953. I have things to do and don’t have time to sit and twiddle my thumbs waiting for a pot to boil over a flame that couldn’t melt an M&M that was in a child’s hand for an hour.
So, as for creating a dessert that could be served at a dinner party in the banquet room of the ninth ring of hell, I was overwhelmingly successful. The key lime was murdered and I swear I heard the faint mournful cries of a chicken somewhere when I brought the egg yolks, lime juice, and other stuff to a boil on high rather than medium.
The chore of making the meringue was like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill over and over. I was forced to make meringue 4 times only to finally have it come out, not with stiff peaks that would make sir Edmund Hillary drool with climbing lust, but instead with the consistency of the melted marsh mellow man from Ghostbusters. I whipped that stuff like it stole something and all it did was sit there like a blob of white. The stuff was probably laughing at me because it knew something very important that I didn’t. You can’t make meringue in plastic bowl. I only know this because of the amount of people that have laughed at me when I told them the story. “Doug! You can’t use a plastic bowl! Why? Blah blah blah something about denaturing egg proteins and making chickens weep openly”. Honestly people! I’m the boss! Need the info! Stupid pie.
One good thing did happen though as I invented Vanishing Meringue. After I put in on the Key lime it quickly turned from melted Marsh Mellow Man into a soap bubble-like consistency and then disappeared over the course of 2 days. It was like a sign from the Baking Gods that the meringue had suffered enough and was taken into that big Refrigerator in the sky. Goodbye Meringue, I’ll always remember the good time I had beating the hell out of you.
If you see this pie in real life...you may be in Hell.
Sawmill Gravy XOXO!
Creation?
Paula Deen’s Sawmill Gravy (Sausage Gravy)
Chance of Disaster? The forecast is high considering it’s me doing the cooking. I’d say there is a better than average chance that this
could be a named kitchen hurricane.
Chance of Farm animals chasing me down in revenge of their fallen comrade? Let’sjust say that I’m going to have my running shoes on when I go outside. A lot of pigs have given up their chance of ever flying so I could have breakfast this morning and I’m not sure if pigs grieve angry, so I think I’m just going to stay out-of-the-way.
Can I make this healthier? Yes, but at what cost? I think it was Shakespeare who said, ‘Do we not sacrifice our souls through war and hard
work so we can eat like we have 2 holes in our stomachs.’ Sure, I could use Soy crumbles to take away a lot of the fat and I could use other low-fat/low
calorie ingredients as well but at what cost to the meal? Would I not sacrifice the soul of the meal itself by using those ingredients? If you really want to
make this healthier…serve it on a bed of lettuce.
Can I make room for it or work it off with exercise? Sure, as long as you don’t mind towing the entire Spanish Armada across the English
Channel. Swimming is great exercise as you know.
The Story- Sausage gravy, also known as southern champagne (I may have made that up), is proof of a loving god. I don’t know what brilliant
southerner invented it or how but I believe that the invention of it alone should be enough to warrant an end to any northerner doing a southern accent
when imitating a dumb person. I personally believe its creamy goodness could change a zombie back to human form. It only has 3 ingredients (4 if you
count love) which makes it hard to screw up but that didn’t stop me from doing my best to make Elmer’s glue out of it.
Before I start, I should point out that I have an unnatural fear of sausage in ‘Natural Casing’. It’s the natural casing that bothers me. It just seems quite unnatural to say that. As if some pigs in the waller actually come with a natural casing that wasn’t their skin. The whole thing just gave me the chills and keeps me off of slaughterhouse tours. Being that I have this unnatural fear I went for the precooked sausage crumbles that Jimmy Dean was kind enough to think of.
This choice lead to another problem though, actually 2 other problems. One, precooked sausage crumbles don’t contain the amount of grease that non
precooked ones have. Luckily, I have made some thick cut bacon and saved the grease which I used to flavor up the sausage. My other problem thought was the fact that I accidentally looked at the back of the sausage crumbles bag. Sweet merciful crap are they bad for you! This cooking experiment is certainly going
to shorten my life.
Ignoring that last thought, I soldiered on in the makeshift gravy factory. Adding the proper amounts of flour and heavy cream, I ignored my inner voices and followed the recipe as written rather than simply tossing it all in and stirring a few times. I realized a huge mistake though as I had estimated (Old habits die-hard) the amount of sausage crumbles rather than measuring them. You have to understand that my powers of estimating are a bit off as I would estimate the moon is just out of reach. I quickly remedied this by doubling everything else which made double the sausage gravy. Everyone wins…except the pigs of course.
I was going to have some homemade buttermilk biscuits to drowned in it but I was feeling like I shouldn’t push my luck as the Great Pig in the Sky was already angry and may strike down upon my biscuits with a furious curse that would turn them into Navajo pottery suitable for selling at small craft shows held in even smaller churches. With that in mind, I cracked open a roll of premade ones.
Would Anything Make This Recipe Better? Tough question but I’d say the only thing that would have made the gravy better was if it was being
served to me in the back of a Bentley Continental GT by the Queen of England as we puttered around the English countryside sharing funny childhood moments of the awkward nature.
Would this be the menu item I would choice if I was being dropped onto a desert island for an extended stay by a pirate who was angry because I had gotten into his secret Hooch supply? Yes, I might even hide from the rescue boats if I felt I had enough to last longer. Perhaps I would spell out a message in coconuts that said, “Terribly sorry, had to run. Come back soon. Pleasant voyage. Pip Pip”
Man Vs. Kitchen
My name is Doug Morrissey.
I am not a cook. I’m a food interpreter and much like many interpretations…it often goes wrong with a fantasticness normally reserved for movie star mug shots. There are a few reasons that I have found over the years that help to explain why I am to cooking what a baby deer is to ice skating.
1-My measuring skills are as accurate as a monkey proofreading a harry potter novel. I believe to my soul that I have an ingrained knowledge of weights and measures. This is not true. I may be the worst estimator in the history of estimating. My error is that I always error on more, much more. If I’m adding spice to a dish than it will be hotter that the surface of the sun. If I have to add salt then you should just prepare yourself to swell up like a human sponge. A pinch is a cup and season to taste means season until I can only taste the seasoning.
2- I don’t time things. I believe that my internal clock is flawless mean while it’s quite obviously broken; not just broken but smashed to bits under the wheels of a train then drug off the tracks by a bear and buried in the woods. I think I have early onset Cooking Alzheimer’s or case of Cooking Dementia so advanced medical science has yet to catch up to me. I haven’t figured out which. I get befuddled in the kitchen like an old man in the self-scan checkout. I hear the microwave go off while I’m stirring something and I’m like ‘What the heck is that?’ That’s when I open the door and find out that the roll that I had put in for
one minute with every intention of pulling out at 15 seconds has now been fired like clay in a kiln. If I painted it I could make a bundle by passing it off at
craft shows and early Native American pottery.
3- I think I know what I’m doing and thus have no need to follow silly recipes step by step because I can improve them. This is the problem with every guy on the planet. We have a John Wayne can-do attitude without having even the most rudimentary child-like Easy Bake Oven skills. I have created things over the years that would make Gandhi fake hunger strike just to avoid it.
4- I think I can make up recipes from scratch. The problem here is I have NO understanding of food and what goes together. I might as well be mixing shoes with cabbage. I have cooked some disasters in my day. As a self-proclaimed food interpreter, I don’t follow recipes. I make up what sounds
good in my head. The problem is with all the voices in my head talking at once I get bits of everything and I end up with the equivalent of a set of
instructions for a culinary weapon of mass consumption. I’ll give you a perfect example; I once tried to make a pie. I had the brilliant idea to make a peanut
butter crust by taking peanut butter chips that normally go in cookies (or directly in my mouth) and lining a pie tin with them and melting them. I did
that then I filled the tin up with chocolate pudding. I placed my Frankenpie gently in the refrigerator to let the magic happen and sat down with a self-satisfied
feeling and watched the clock. I realized my mistake rather quickly when I took Frankenpie out and tried to cut a piece. The true mistake, as I have
determined, was not a having a chainsaw handy as that would have been what was needed to break the super molecular bond that had formed in my
“crust”.
5- I like to cook and that’s not helping matters. Life would be much better if I didn’t think often about owning a small BBQ place where everyone knew your name. I figure if I did open a small place, I would be in business for a total of 15 minutes. The next day the local newspaper would be running the headline Local Man Tries to Poison Town with Secret Recipe.
6- I’m a personal trainer. I love southern food. It’s like the Romeo and Juliet. “Hushpuppy, Hushpuppy! Wherefore art thou Hushpuppy?” I’m supposed to live clean and eat things rabbits hop over in the forest. Let me tell you something folks, if I were born in the south I’d be 800 pounds and a side show fat man in a small but profitable traveling circus.
7-I have exercise guilt. Since my true love is as healthy as making a living as a speed bump and fat personal trainers don’t get a lot of business, I have to balance like a Flying Wallenda on a tightrope over a deep fat fryer. I’m killing myself to eat and killing myself by eating. It’s an interesting pickle.
With all of these things working against me I’m going to plow ahead and learn to cook under the wing of my Southern Fried Soul Mate, Paula Deen. I have purchased her cookbook The Southern Cooking Bible and I will be going thru it in no particular order. I may try to make things healthier but not at the risk of stripping the soul from the dish. The key here is moderation and I will be doing recipes once or twice a week and filling in the empty spaces with my own personal ramblings. I hope you enjoy the journey into the fryer.
