Duds Day

No, this is not a knock on Father's Day. We had, in fact, a spectacular day on Sunday; it started with a characteristically excellent brunch at the Elk Creek Café in Millheim. I ordered chicken liver toasts to start, which were rich and delicious, and, fortunately, delicately portioned. (This was no Barnie Greengrass-sized ice-cream scoop of chicken liver). Thus I still had plenty of room for a plate of local sausage and eggs. If you haven't tried 'em, you must: the locally-made sausage patties are perfectly-spiced and grilled; the eggs, produced by free-range hens that live down the road, have the darkest yolks we've ever seen.

Then we spent part of the afternoon at a lake, before stopping on the way back for soft-serve ice cream. A fine, fine day.

So I'm not knocking Father's day. What I am knocking are my two worst meals: two solid, hollow thuds that remain, however far away in calendar time, disturbingly present in the kitchen. SW's lament about a bad run-in with the skillet in response to the last post led me to reflect on these bad memories. It doesn't take much to remind me, mind you: the meals were that bad.

What went wrong? Like most disasters, it's rarely one mishap that lies at the source but many: disaster is the effect of overdetermination. I think of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, wherein the murder victim has been stabbed by everyone on the train, and thus by no single agent alone. Bad days in the kitchen are, I think, much like that.

For anyone can, based on a sudden mental lapse, dump a whole soup down the drain by forgetting to place the sieve over a bowl or pot; you end up saving only the useless bones and such. A split second mistake with major results. But the result is simply: no soup. By contrast, it takes a whole symphony of errors to achieve a truly gruesome meal.

I have two that come especially to mind:

The first is something I now refer to as "Pasta Dufresne":

The dish, named in hindsight after the escape scene from The Shawshank Redemption, might look innocuous enough on paper. But in person it was an utter shipwreck. The ingredient list was fairly modest, combining black olives, garlic, and, I think, asparagus in the sauce. And shrimp. Now, some of these ingredients might conceivably belong together. And who knows: with enough white wine and lemon, and no black olives, it might have worked.

But I simply cannot fully describe how utterly inedible this was. The strange thing-- I recall SW's own surprise here-- is that I improvise pasta throw-togethers all the time. At their best, the "throwing together" produces perfectly adequate results. Sometimes even elegant. (In such cases, I prefer to call the dish an insieme. It sounds better).

But this was an instant throw-away: a cestinare.

As I was writing this I asked H. if she could remember what was in it, just to make sure I had the details straight. She rehearsed the shameful litany as if it had just befouled our lips last night.

It had been at least a couple years-- and yet the trauma remains. Disappointments come and go; talent waxes and wanes. But hell, a real disaster. Now that's something.

Part 2: X-Mas Pudding
(to be continued. . . )