Food

Feast on This

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Microwave cooking: From “well-done!” to “Well, done.”

* * * *
I don’t know how technology works.

To the best of my knowledge, this is how yo explain electricity: Step 1, flowing water or wind turns a turbine which looks like a giant screw, and Step 2, I walk through my front door, pick up a black rectangle, punch a red button, and “Dah dahdah, dah dahdah,” Sportscenter is on my television.

(Hilariously enough, and by “hilarious,” I mean not at all, I wrote technical documents—white papers—for electrical engineers for five years and instruction manuals that were used in home construction around the nation. You’re welcome. My work can still be found in various “Lowe Depots” across the land and in forgotten workbenches in garages everywhere else. Expertise takes different forms, and mine is in forming sentences. The engineers supplied all the science-y numbers that make buildings happen.)

Cooking is among my top several favorite activities to pursue when cooking is something to be done. I reminded my girlfriend of this recently:
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Kitchen Scars

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Cooking is not something that I—what’s the word?—ah, yes: “Do.”

One does not live to be 47 without some food here and there, so I have eaten a thing or two most of the days I have spent here, and I must have even prepared a meal or a few in order to have made it this far. And I was not left to forage in the woods behind our house when I was growing up; my mom is an excellent and health-conscious cook. Thanks to her early adoption of a low- and sometimes no-salt kitchen, my heart will probably continue beating long after the rest of me has permanently allowed all my subscriptions to lapse.

This is not to say that I do not remember eating or cooking; oh, I do. My cooking is not memorable, though, in either direction: tasty treat or sublime sludge. I almost envy the good writers who are bad cooks (not as much as I envy the non-writers who are good cooks), because at least something interesting comes from their culinary assaults on taste and decency.
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Achy Breaky Coffee

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my talents is breaking things. (I have others; they just have not yet been revealed to me.) I am not a physically strong individual. I just use what strength I possess ineptly.

Now, I know that anyone can break anything with enough gumption and/or strength. Give a man a big enough lever, and he can move the world, said Archimedes. Teach a man to swim and he can fish for a bicycle, said no one.

At best, this talent is an inadvertent one; at worst, it portends possible certain probable doom for the planet.
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