Dish It Up

As a young teen, visiting Germany for a summer, I discovered just how much I really loved to cook and eat once I'd escaped my parents' sparse, ration-couponed vegetarian Presbyterian pantry. Pantry is an exaggeration. More like a shelf in a funky kitchen cabinet where cheese and margarine (kosher for some reason) took up half the space for half the week. Vegetarian tinned goods from a Seventh Day Adventist company in America were stored separately in the hall closet where we kept a jumble of everyone's shoes.And on a similar note (food + apparel) our clean, but unironed laundry, blouses and shirts mainly, was kept in the living room sideboard. Just to give you an idea how food and food related furniture was viewed in our household. You can tell I'm looking for pity here. Anyhow, Frau Strudel (not her real name) cooked two hearty meals a day for a family of six, using lard and sugar in amounts that would cheerfully choke a yak. My food reformist Papa would have had me sent home had he known, bless his little lentil loving heart. Not to prove a point about diet or anything, I'm glad my Dad is still around in his 90's of course, but I'm going to give genes more credit than lentils, so there !

Frau S's menus of mostly pork, potato, apple and whipped cream delicacies turned my tummy and tastebuds on to an elevated level of textures, flavors, aromas and the whole sensual array of gustatory pleasures. Luckily, thanks to a mild thyroid condition, I've never really packed on the pounds as I should have. The only positive side effect of medical malady that one could claim to be happy about I suppose. So if I can't cook for some reason, like being bedridden or traveling, I cook vicariously by watching tv cook shows or lick my thumb through the pages of foody magazines and books. This is where the beef comes in.

The cooking show I'm REALLY waiting for, is the one that has the guts to show viewers the dirty piles of used bowls and utensils the cook really has to use. You know the ones, heaped off to the side, out of camera view, so that you have no bloody idea of the real work you're in for. My kitchen is so small that unless I clean as I go, I'm likely to have to store dirty dishes pots and bowls in the dryer and washer - and don't think I haven't done that ! I just want the tv shows to be a little more honest, don't you? You never see what happens to the washing up before you eat dinner and who chopped up all those tiny dishes of ingredients so deftly tossed into the mix, what about them, eh? Usually the dirty and emptied bowl is just whisked off the counter to a culinary Bermuda triangle, where there are NO cameras. Same with pots - and by the way, what about pots and pans too hot to store safely anywhere other than the oven or stovetop? Notice how the camera craftily pans away from the ghastly to the glorious, focusing instead of the fancy finished platter. Nobody holds them accountable for this gross gap in reality, we are just so dazzled by the thought of guzzling our way through the end results and the praise of our family and friends who wonder just how we did it all.

In our household, my sweetie (and darling I DO appreciate everything you do in the kitchen, especially when you wait till the tv commercial breaks are on before running the water at full force and crashing lid pots about, please know that) thinks he's helping by rinsing off a few plates and stacking them in the dishwasher, but has NO IDEA that I've already broken the back of the beast by cleaning as I go: chopping boards, knives, measuring bowls and spoon, mixing bowls and so on, not to mention scrubbing out last night's rice and cooking pots that he just had to leave soaking in the sink... Once, I had such a frenzied day of cooking that I hit on the brilliant idea of just tossing all the dirty stuff into a cardboard box or two and lugging them out to the garage. It was wonderful and made the post dinner cleanup a breeze. Mostly because I forgot all about the bloody boxes of stuff in the garage until a couple of weeks later. Oh well.

Look, where's there's a good dinner there's a good bet some poor bugger is stuck with the cleanup before and after the gluttony begins, and I think it's only fair that all foodie shows give them due credit with a little footage before and after and their names just as big as the chef's on the rolling credits. All recipes should include washing up time before and after consumption, and the number of dirty utensils entailed. I just watched a tv show that used only five ingredients per recipe. Great, or so I thought. The husky-voiced brunette chef smiled us through three dishes for a complete Thanksgiving dinner, true enough, but I lost count of the bowls and pans she used, because I finally noticed how many she was going through. Yes, I know it's just a tv show, but that's not the same as saying it's just entertainment when people complain about misleading special effects in action films on the big screen. In cooking you're SUPPOSED to try this at home !! So cook with caution, is all I'm saying here. Oh, and let's bring back a unionized group of scullery maids of any gender, a lost and underappreciated labor force. Although these days they're probably only to be found in restaurant kitchens and might not be registered to vote. Well, they still get my vote.