Ye Olde Food Concepts

SOME THOUGHT FOR FOOD

Jack Bragen

Since childhood, I’ve hated red apples. At school I would take a brown paper lunch bag with the apple inside, and I would slam it on a hard surface so that I could have fun demolishing something. Over a decade later, I witnessed a comedian of the 1980’s, “Gallagher,” do something similar, which was to take a sledgehammer to watermelons.
The main problem with red apples is that their peel is thick and unappetizing and gets stuck in your teeth. Additionally, that red apple peel will conceal bruised spots which are unappetizing as well.
As a grown man by chance with a drawer full of red apples that my wife purchased, I finally got a knife and cut off that horrible red peel from the apple. The bruised parts were then visible to be cut off. And then, I thought to ream out the core of the apple, and I was left with a piece of fruit that could be enjoyably and quickly devoured in the absence of any hindrance.
Sometimes oranges are a slight difficulty, and you can make it easier by scoring the surface of the peel with your knife, in longitudinal lines. This makes for more rapid peeling of the orange with less effort.
I find that although slower, it is very Zen and more enjoyable to get back to the stovetop on certain things in place of the microwave oven. For breakfast I made oatmeal in a battered red Teflon pot. I am not afraid that the Teflon will give me cancer, even though there is an impending ban on it.
For eggs, there is no replacement for a stainless steel frying pan that has become seasoned from repeated use. I find that spray canola oil works better than trying to melt a piece of margarine in the pan. You can scramble your eggs with a little milk with your egg beater that you keep handy, and meanwhile, the frying pan is getting up to temperature.
I am unlike the famous Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, in that I despise washing dishes. Sometimes I pay a friend twenty bucks to do them for me when I can’t bite the bullet and wash them myself.
We haven’t cleaned our oven in a long time. I am sure not to turn it past four hundred degrees, as I am sure it would cause a fire. At three-fifty it hardly smokes at all, and can still be used for most things. A frozen pizza is ok for lazy evenings, but watch out: it has a massive amount of sodium.
But I use the stovetop, mostly. For example, I’ll take a whole chicken and fit it into a large pot, with water, and boil it whole until cooked. It produces a moist and juicy but not greasy chicken. Or, if you’re picky and can only eat breast meat, you can buy a package of chicken breast, divide it, rinse it, and bag each piece individually to freeze. This allows you to fix small meals with one or more pieces of chicken breast. This is far more expensive per pound than whole chicken, however.
You can buy jars of Indian simmer sauce at the local import store to cook chicken pieces that come out tenderer than those cooked in water. You can also simmer raw chicken with a jar of spaghetti sauce until cooked, and this can make a sumptuous chicken spaghetti sauce. Using the microwave to defrost can help prevent spoilage. Most new microwaves have a feature that allows you to enter the weight of the thing you’re defrosting, and then the oven calculates the defrost time.
You can safely refreeze something that you have just defrosted in the microwave, while it is not safe to refreeze something that has been sitting unrefrigerated for a long time. It takes some hours for the dangerous bacteria to multiply. If you cook meat thoroughly just before consumption, you should not get food poisoning—this is so even if the meat is spoiled. But don’t try it: if it was spoiled before cooking, the taste and smell will be indescribably bad.
Most of the above bits of advice, you probably already know but may have forgotten, in this age of high tech gadgetry and engineered fast food. Spending a bit more time in the kitchen to get it right can be a good hobby as well as a stress reducer.