Hell's Kitchen

I refer not to the reality TV cooking show on Fox starring the mercurial Gordon Ramsay¹, but rather to the kitchen situated on the first floor of 2034 Maple Ave., Evanston, Illinois.

In the rare months of summer, when the snow finally disappears from Chicago and the Lake Michigan beaches give you more suntan than frostbite, my kitchen turns into a sauna. Actually, the entire first floor clocks in at a nice balmy 140 degrees – at least, that’s what it feels like to me. I’m relatively certain that if I left a pan of pork shoulder out in the kitchen for a few hours, I’d end up with slow-cooked pork. I can’t imagine Hell being much hotter than this.

Cooking in the summer is unbearable – it’s bad enough that the entirety of the first floor feels like Heinola, Finland², but to be standing next to an open flame on the stove while the oven preheats at 400 degrees and the microwave hacks and wheezes its way into defrosting a brick of frozen chicken breasts makes it even worse. It’s a miracle my non-stick pans haven’t melted while cooking. If Jeff from Food Network Star were to cook in my kitchen, he would have generated enough sweat to dissolve his spring rolls into soup.

My complaints about the kitchen hardly stop there – our microwave is on the verge of self-destruction, our oven cooks at the preset temperature plus or minus about 150 degrees, we never have enough pots or pans, the stove creaks when it turns on and always bursts into flames, except for when there is no flame and you can smell the gas coming from the stove^{3. Yet despite all that, I’ve endured a whole year’s worth of cooking in that little bandbox of a kitchen. The bottom line is that it will always be the kitchen where I first started to really cook.}

With that said, I’ll spend the next couple posts recapping my last year of cooking and eating, as I’m home in Taipei now and won’t be trotting out any new dishes anytime soon. We’ll start with some of this year’s lowlights, for the sake of comedic relief.

Stupidest kitchen moment: Definitely the one time I put a metal fork in the microwave. I figured out something was wrong once the fork started sparking and the kitchen smelled like burnt metal. By the time I removed the plate and fork, there was a burnt hole in the fork handle and sprinklings of metal debris all over my plate of leftovers. Yum!

Worst dish: Pork Belly Confit

The dish is supposed to look like this:

Delicious, succulent, fatty pieces of pork

Instead, it looked like this:

Lumps of shit

This undertaking was a nightmare from the start – completely lacking any sort of a butcher knife (the house did, however, have many blunt knives that had been butchered through repeated mistreatment), I had to attempt to remove the skin of the pork belly, a Herculean endeavor that took almost an hour and ended with me snapping the blade of a knife clean from the hilt.

When it was all said and done, the pieces of pork looked like they had been coated in Vaseline and then left to crust into rock hard lumps. I put in about twice as much cloves as the recipe called for, and the result was it felt like biting into a brick that someone had sprinkled some Splenda on. All the makings of a gourmet meal!

Biggest kitchen debacle: Curried Cauliflower Soup

Flood catalyst

The debacle wasn’t in the making of the soup – it tasted pretty good. However, after boiling down the cauliflower and milk, the soup needed to be pureed smooth. Unable to find a ladle, I decided a solo cup would make a worthy substitute in transferring the soup from the stovetop to the blender. It was not. The cup began to warp and melt instantaneously the second the piping hot soup mixture was in there. Oops.

After finally transferring the soup into the blender and getting the right texture to it, I had to detach the blender from the base. However, the weight of the blender made it hard to turn and detach with all the soup in it. What I thought was jiggling the blender around to loosen and detach it actually served to unscrew the blender bottom from the rest of the blender. The result was after a couple of good hard twists the soup burst through the bottom of my blender and drowned the poor kitchen tiles in a sea of yellow soup. I ended up with about three bowls of soup from a recipe that supposedly made 6-8 servings.

Thankfully, no photographic evidence exists of my kitchen follies. But I might start documenting these in the coming year in hopes of putting together a second volume of my failures in the kitchen, of which there are plenty. That’s the great part about only presenting your finished, successful dishes on Facebook – no one knows about all the shit you have to go through in between to get there. Except my poor roommates, that is. Luckily, these disasters have come hand-in-hand with some dishes that have turned out quite well for me – a topic I’ll tackle in my next post.

Photo credits:


Pork belly confit
Charcoal⁴

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^{1. This can also be read as, “Gordon Ramsay, the batshit insane celebrity chef whose reality TV shows are as much about him screaming at the contestants as they are about cooking.”↩}

^{2. The site of the World Sauna Championships, which were discontinued in 2010 after a finalist died trying to endure the heat of the sauna.↩}

<sup>3. Also, within four days of moving in, the smoke detector in the kitchen had been dismantled because it beeped every time someone used the stove. It’s a minor miracle that the house didn’t burn down within the first month of us living there.↩

4. In conjunction with Rule 34, when I Google Image searched "Charcoal", there was a prominently featured charcoal drawing of boobs on the first page.↩</sup>