#Easy Cooking for Today

[cooking-pol-martin]

W.A.P.: Wet Ass Pol

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, you fucking with some wet-ass Pol Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass Pol Give me everything you got for this wet-ass Pol

Let's start at the beginning, way back to when I first watched the series of YouTube videos in which a bunch of streamers recoil, plead, and beg Pol Martin to stop doing unholy shit with a microwave. Later, after the eye-bleeding stopped, my family and I would discuss both what was the most horrific recipe, and what the funniest response to said horror was. I was always partial to "What's he going to do with that banana??" Now, after making "Sausage and Bean Cheese Casserole," the quote "It's not enough! That's not done!", as screamed by WayneRadioTV, is rapidly rocketing up to my favorite.

Before I put the knives in, I want to say some good things about Pol Martin, and also semi-justify my choice of this recipe, which is not auspicious sounding in the least. The good thing: this recipe is part of a section of Easy Cooking for Today, vol 2 called "Rush Hour Cooking." One of the things I appreciate about Pol's cookbooks is how accommodating they are for the reader's time and budget. We don't always have the time or money to mess around with slow food*, and I dig that he devotes whole sections of his cookbooks to weekday meals.

While Noam Chomsky once famously declared that a native speaker of a language cannot make a grammar mistake -- something I think is true, especially when talking about dialects like BEV that get maligned as "slang" -- there's something seriously wrong with the phrase sausage and bean cheese casserole. So, the cheese is made from beans? Is that the takeaway? Because no, there isn't bean cheese, and also this isn't a cheese casserole with sausage and beans in it. Also, it's not a casserole in any way I understand the term. But the ingredients weren't horrifying, and I felt like I should take another run at his microwave recipes after the non-failure of the tomato soup.

There are words I don't want associated with my food. A short, non-exhaustive list: seepage, turgid, moist, quaggy, pulpous. This recipe checks alllll of those boxes. Watching the videos again, it struck me how wet ass Pol's recipes consistently are. Like he puts flour or corn starch into the sauces he's microwaving, presumably to thicken them, but that shit doesn't fucking work in a microwave. So then he just pours a bunch of salmonella over microwaved chicken livers or whatever. Here's your disease sauce on top of rough-chopped wet pepper chunks and chicken tartare! Another potential favorite quote from the YouTube series: Chunks of oversized bell pepper and wet make this much better.

I fucking love the use of wet as noun.

Except in food. I don't love that.

Okay, so let's start into the recipe. It opens with vegetables, which is legitimately fine. I chopped up celery and onions, drizzled them with oil, and popped it in the nuker. Next came a shittonne of meat. A hallmark of Pol's recipes is a weird mixture of different meats. The recipe for lasagna rolls had veal and ham, a combo which must have made sense in the 80s but is madness now. Here, it was ground beef and sliced smoked pork sausage, which is honestly fine though.

Now, I've had success with recipes that microwaved ground beef, but it was almost always as a prelude to actually cooking that shit in the oven. Unlike cooking with radiant heat like a normal person, cooking vegetables in a microwave only makes them shed liquid which then just sits there and doesn't boil off. But cooking meat? When I pulled out the dish after four minutes on high it looked like this.

That's not enough! That's not done!

I don't actually want to get trichinosis, so I put this back in for another four minutes. I am willing to stunt-cook 1980's recipes, but I'm not willing to die for it. Also, can you see the accumulation of wet? The meat sweat seepage? The turgid suppuration, like from a fleshy gash? Dear reader, bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass Pol, because it's only going to get wetter.

Now comes the enwettening. Pol had me pour two whole ass cups of clamato juice over this cursed concoction, making it inextricably wetter. There is no coming back from this. We're deep in eldritch levels of wetness. Give me everything you got for this wet-ass Pol.

Before I wind up this wetness though, I want to tell an anecdote about Canada. I had never heard of clamato juice -- which is tomato juice with a hint of clam -- until I went to the Winnipeg Folk Festival in the mid-90s. The legal drinking age in the US was 21; it was 18 in Manitoba. I was of legal drinking age in the States, but my two friends with me were not, so they made some choices. One of them was to order a Blood Caesar, an apparently Canadian drink like a Bloody Mary, but with clamato juice instead of tomato. (Coincidentally, I just watched the Letterkenny episode with the Caesar contest -- in which they competed to make the best Bloody Caesar -- and everything on that show is super Canadian.)

This was on the way back from the folk fest, so we were strung out, hung over, and well sick of one another. My friend who ordered the Bloody Caesar swore up and down it was amazing after we razzed her about it. It was only later, when we'd gotten showers and hydration, that she admitted she actually hated it, at which point it turned into something of an inside joke. So I was amused to see the dreaded clamato in one of Pol's recipes, because its inclusion is both dated and extremely regional. I love regionally specific idioms, the kind of thing that people from a boutique in-group use without knowing it's not legible to anyone outside that ethnicity/region/interest group.

Once this egregious shit came out of the microwave, I got a slotted spoon and poured this over spaghetti noodles. We legit talked about whether to use a slotted spoon or a normal one, because we had to contend with the wetness. I went slotted. Also, I'm going to admit the noodles were gluten-free noodles, because I had a medical thing a while back and had to avoid gluten. Since my recovery there's been a lot of gluten-free stuff in the house that I need to use up. Then I rolled up a forkful of this not-casserole.

I'm going to be honest: it took me a hot minute to put this in my mouth, despite the fact that I was super hungry. It just doesn't look good. But I did and it was ... fine. 100% ok. Bland and uninteresting, but not spit-it-in-the-garbage terrible. I even had a few bites before deciding to be done with it. Like so many of Pol's recipes, it reminded me of my childhood, not in a good way or a bad way, just in a way. The impression I had was of grade school lunch rooms. Not salty, not seasoned, just an uninteresting mix of starch and protein designed to be wolfed down by a bunch of kids in a too-short meal time.

I'm on my 11th recipe in my cooking Pol Martin project, and I realize I keep grappling with the concept of nostalgia this whole time. I'm a Gen Xer, a tiny, in-between generation that has often defined itself by a weird kind of oppositional nostalgia. We were all-in with the post-punk grunge thing and pretending like we weren't corporate assholes in our 20s, but I think that ended up being mostly a bunch of posturing and bullshit. The most relevant things the Xers have given to the world are the Karen -- I graduated high school with four people named Karen Johnson -- and Elon Fucking Musk. It's probably not a surprise that a whole generation raised on Reaganomics ended up being mostly awful.

Pol's recipes have been redolent of a certain time, and I love that about them. I love that I've been transported to memories of my childhood, of people and places that are dead and gone, that I didn't know I remembered. I've had really intense memories of my beloved Grandma Dory, and she's been gone long enough that that feels like a gift. I feel like nostalgia is perfecting, smoothing out the jagged edges so you only remember the experience of being a child, which is itself a wonder, especially at a remove. And that perfection is a danger, especially on a generational level, because those times weren't actually good times: like everything in a life, both the sweet and the bitter season everything.

But nostalgia can be fucking dangerous. It is memory without shame, reverie without accountability. I was born the year Nixon had to step down as president for doing things not half as awful as the current administration has done this afternoon, and something worse will happen tomorrow. But just because things are worse now, doesn't mean things were good then. We lived in real fear, and the fear I feel now has the same bitter truth: our leaders do not have our best interests at heart, and in many ways are specifically trying to hurt us.

Don't even get me started about Reagan. I lived through that shit so don't come at me with some bullshit hagiography unless you have receipts, and you don't. You can't; they don't exist. He was awful and a lot of people died. I sat in hospital rooms while family friends died of AIDS, and I legitimately don't want to talk about their horrible fucking families of origin because it's too depressing. That's Reagan's legacy: and entire generation of gay men decimated. For a start.

Phew.

You know, a lot of these little write-ups of stunt-cooking some French-Canadian chef's recipes end up with me frothing at the mouth about something or other in the past. I'll admit, some of this is me: I like a good mouth-frothing. But there's also something about food, about preparing, cooking, and eating together that allows me to access a deeper, non-linguistic substrate of memory. And all of that is inextricably bound up with my larger experience of culture and history. I ate a table with my parents and sister, and we inevitably discussed our days, from the prosaic to the political. While I don't love remembering the bad things, those bad things sharply define the boundaries of the good. To quote my beloved Ursula K. Le Guin: "Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light."

So. Where do we go from here? The funny thing about this recipe is that is has such potential. Clamato juice in a casserole is actually really interesting, and I could see using it as a liquid for some starch -- like rice or noodles -- that would soak up all the wetness. (In fact, that's what I did -- added some rice -- because with a little starch, this makes perfectly balanced dog food. That's how bland this was.) Honestly, I'm half-tempted to restructure this recipe to be actually good, because the ingredients are all there, it just doesn't come together. We'll see what I get up to in the days ahead.

*I once went to dinner at the house of a relative who is a devotee of the slow food movement, my small children in tow. While I appreciates the general sentiment behind slow food -- traditional recipes, done in the time they need -- I don't fucking appreciate having my kids freak out because they've been waiting two hours for some nonsense to come out of the oven. After that horror show, I always made sure to bring enough snacks to keep the inevitable hunger meltdown at bay. I hate when ideology gets in the way of practicality.

[carpbait]

oooo for art requests, can we get tango and skizz and/or pearl playing hungry hermits? your zedango to art is the cutest i’ve seen in a while <3

totally misread this but i hope you enjoy them anyways!! ive been totally obsessed with their dynamic as of late haha & thank you so much!!

[every-sanji]

[occluminary]

it's 1PM and i guess i should get out of bed since i haven't eaten anything in a while

[lynne-monstr]

after work today, I picked up my library books and went for a run and then by some miracle I had enough motivation to make myself a quiche. what a productive day!

[feroluce]

Call me Topaz's thigh strap, the way I'm barely making ends meet-

[cooking-pol-martin]

Mythbusting Pol Martin

When you have little kids, you have a delicate balance to walk with media. While I'm not terribly censorious -- I don't think any given kid is going to be traumatized by hearing the f-bomb, plus largely it was me dropping them -- but there's plenty of media that can be upsetting with no cusses at all. I don't think the kids ever saw the sketch on Robot Chicken called "Tooth & Consequences", but I do remember vividly thinking, whelp, make extra sure they never watch THAT shit. While I think The Family Guy sucks, it was more that the one kid would repeat the most annoying punchlines for days that got that show banned from the house.

But then the grownups in the house also had to contend with children's media, which runs the gamut from awesome to the fuck outta here. I loved Yo Gabba Gabba!; tolerated Dora the Explorer; and absolutely banned both Calliou and Barney. All this is winding up to say there were two shows (for lack of a better word) that everyone in the family could absolutely agree on: Homestar Runner and Mythbusters. If you've never watched Mythbusters, the format is thus: they find a myth and then try to recreate the conditions. If they can't -- if it's busted -- then they try to make the myth happen by any means necessary.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Pol Martin.

I made two Pol Martin recipes this week: "Braised Rib-Eye Steaks" and "Pepper Rice." (They were for different meals, because I've learned my lesson about ruining dinner.) When I started the Pol Martin project lo, these many months ago, I declared I was going to follow the recipe as closely as I was able. This resulted in me doing things like boiling leeks for half a godamn fiscal hour which I will never do again, thank you very much. I was in my recreating conditions phase, to put it in terms of Mythbusters. This resulted in a lot of busting.

Since then, I've decided to cut myself some slack sometimes. (Not always, because I followed the ridic instructions for "Fish & Vegetable Salad" to the letter, to Wet Ass Pol results.) But for the two recipes that are the subject of this essay, I decided to hew to the ingredients list and proportions as closely as I could -- with some minor deviations -- but I more or less chucked his cooking instructions. I'm a better than decent cook with decades of experience in the kitchen, and I'm just going to say it: sometimes his recipes are wrong. So I'm just trying to make them work, like the Mythbusters do once the myth gets busted.

The first recipe I tried was "Braised Rib-Eye Steaks." I'm of the opinion that it's difficult to fuck up a good cut of meat. To be fair, I've seen Pol give it the college try, like when, in one of the digitized video tapes, he goes to the market for a salmon steak and then microwaves that bitch to death. I suppose the amendment to my declaration being: it's difficult to fuck up a good cut of meat, except if there's a microwave involved. Like I've never made scallops because I'm terrified of screwing up something that's roughly $30 a pound. But I got some nice rib-eyes from Costco, and was ready to get to it.

The major change to this recipe was that I made it in the Instapot. Braising requires time, time which I didn't have. The Instapot, with its pressure cook setting, can cut two hours of braising down to 20 minutes. (My mom, who was a working single mother, used a pressure cooker all the time to get dinner on the table, so this feels really regular to me.) I also rearranged the order the ingredients went into the cooker. Pol almost always puts the spices in too early, which makes the volatile aromatics in, say, garlic cook off. I also cut the ... everything smaller than Pol directs. One thing that drives me crazy in his videos is how enormous his dice is. No.

[image description: a photo from one of Pol's cookbooks. Very wet looking sliced beef with vegetables that are diced too big on a pink and green plate. The caption reads "Braised Rib-Eye Steaks (serves 4).]

"Braised Rib-Eye Steaks" turned out good, not amazing, but good. Per usual, the recipe was way too wet. He had me pour a cup of clamato juice and two cups of beef stock over two pounds of meat, which is a ridiculous amount of liquid. But Wet Ass Pol's gonna wet. I was intrigued by the inclusion of clamato juice -- and even added some anchovy paste to punch up the umami -- but honestly I don't know that it added much more than vibes. I liked the turnips which soaked up all the flavor of the broth but still had a little crunch. Usually I think turnips are boring. I had the whole thing over mashed potatoes, which was the right call.

Honestly, my biggest criticism is that braising a rib-eye is kind of a waste of a rib-eye. Like it'll be good, but braising is usually reserved for tougher, more fibrous cuts of meat. Braising is when you sear something to get a nice crust, and then basically poach it in some kind of liquid -- broth is common, but you can do use anything from wine to coconut milk, or a combo -- in an enclosed dish. The low and slow cooking breaks that structure down and makes the meat tender, but the meat isn't submerged so it doesn't go to mush. The rib-eye basically tasted like stew meat, which is obviously delicious, but stew meat is also like half the price of a rib-eye. I liked this enough to do again, but I'd chill on the braising liquid and use a shittier cut of meat.

Oh also? I added a bunch of flour as thickener trying to get the braising liquid to approach something like gravy-like consistency, but there's no overcoming this amount of wetness.

[image description: sliced beef and diced turnips & tomatoes served over mashed potatoes in a dark blue bowl. There's an awful lot of liquid.]

The next recipe I tried was "Pepper Rice." You might think pepper refers to black pepper, but he means bell peppers, just to get that out of the way. I needed a side for this chicken shish kabob recipe I've been wanting to try since my newest collection of sick fucking antique skewers showed up. (Pol has a lot of kebab recipes, and his skewers are all immaculate. The fact that I can't find the sword-shaped ones that aren't a grillion dollars still makes me mad.) I'd run across the "Pepper Rice" recipe and filed it away for a rainy day: it's simple, has normal ingredients, and cooks fast.

[image description: grilled chicken on sick fucking antique skewers with birds and stuff for handles sits on a silver tray.]

I'm going to admit that like the braised rib-eyes, I utterly disregarded his instructions. I've run into this with Pol's recipes before -- notably the "Fish & Vegetable Salad" -- but he often pre-cooks ingredients. I simply don't get this. "Pepper Rice" isn't so different from my go-to Spanish rice recipe, which involves softening the vegetables and then pouring in both the dry rice and chicken broth so that everything cooks together. Instead, Pol wants us to fry up the veggies and then mix in already cooked rice? Why? This is a terrible idea.

[image description: pepper rice and grilled chicken in a dark blue bowl on a bright red tablecloth.]

Hilariously, I didn't get the ratio between the rice and cooking liquid quite right, so I kind of ended up with a Wet Ass Pol situation inadvertently. I just boiled it off. I though the pepper rice was kinda bland, but then my husband waxed all philosophical about letting the subtlety of the pepper's mild sweetness become the focus, without distracting with stronger flavors. Maybe he was humoring me slash Pol, but it's also an interesting way to start thinking about the meta-philosophy of preparing food.

I'm a Midwesterner, so I'm not ever going to go too crazy with spices, but I almost automatically double the garlic in any recipe, add fish sauce, anchovy paste, or capers at every opportunity, and otherwise garnish with soy sauce, sriracha, or whatever condiment seems appropriate, and some that don't. On some basic level, I must value a certain kind of complexity of flavor ... or that's not the right way to put it. Fresh ingredients cooked right without much seasoning can be complex, but they're subtle. It's more like I want the flavors to be more forward.

The best articulation of this is in the cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat which, like it says in the title, argues that the best dishes balance those four attributes, but then also really digs into the various ingredients that contribute to that balance. The recipes in that book aren't amazing, ironically, but articulating a philosophy of cooking and writing a decent recipe are two different skill sets. I think the author is onto something there, at least in the ways flavors interact. Pol's recipe has all the attributes in pretty decent balance: salt from the broth, fat from the oil, acid from the tomatoes, and heat in the browning. But I want something that explores other registers: sweet, hot, green, bright, any of a dozen flavors I can't describe but nonetheless enjoy. I want those four attributes to be a base I can build on.

So. I've made a couple dozen Pol Martin recipes so far. There have been high highs and low lows, and everything in between. I've followed recipes exactly and not so much. I've attempted everything from appetizers to main dishes to desserts. I've used a microwave. But I feel like this is the first time I've really understood that he and I have sometimes fundamental differences in what we value in cooking. So if I take an ingredient list from Pol, which is balanced in one way, and cook it the way most makes sense to me, which is balanced in another, I can really get the most out of his recipes. I think I've really begun to vibe on our differences, Pol and me.

Woof, did that gummy kick in or what? Yeah.

[bluesidedown]

Gratitude time

[newtness532]

i know that graduating one semester later is not that big of a deal and i haven't made any plans about what comes next so it doesnt even make a difference. so why does it feel just so terrible

[supercantaloupe]

just sent an email with the subject line "suspicious shakshuka"

[djsangos]

//forgor to snap a pic of my mall fit today but here's one of the new shirt i got from hot topic lmaoooo

(and i promise i'm wearing shorts that shirt is just ridiculously long for a medium fjklldafjdk)

[maddiemuu]

got chinese food for dinner even though i've already gotten takeout this week. and i was sorta regretting it even though the alternative was probably having Hungry for dinner. but holy shittt the second i started eating i knew i made the right choice lol. if no one got me ik chinese takeout got me...

[01tsubomi]

i made super delicious curry with pork, potatoes, carrots, eggplant, green pepper, mushrooms, and pumpkin and because of how big a pot i made it's only like $2 per portion. adult success

[cooking-pol-martin]

What's he going to do with that banana?

I'll tell you what. Nothing fucking good.

When I started this here endeavor to stunt-cook a bunch of Pol Martin recipes, I honestly was doing it with a spirit of inquiry. There's enough mean-spirited dunking on stuff in the world, and I don't need to add to that. I'll get out my poison pen if I need to, but that's not the primary goal. Plus, I don't want to waste a bunch of food and my time. Life's just too godamn short, and eggs are too expensive.

With that said, "Banana-Filled Omelet" was easily the worst thing I've made in the last decade. Maybe even the last two.

And look, I know: with a name like that, what was I expecting? I honestly chose it because it sounded interesting and unusual. Later, after spitting everything in the trash and recovering with grilled cheese sandwiches, I even said to my husband that I thought it would be fine because banana pudding has milk, eggs, sugar, and bananas. At which point he began laughing at me with the same level of horrified confusion as I did when making this cursed repast. I'm beginning to realize the amount of involuntary cackling I do while cooking these recipes correlates strongly with how bad they are. This was like cackle one million.

So let's get into this catastrophe, shall we?

The first thing that Pol has me do is fry sliced bananas in butter and brown sugar. Here's where the recipe really seems dated, because there's only the barest of instructions about how to accomplish this task. Fine, okay, I'm a big girl. I'll muddle through. The bananas were actually just fine at this point; like there's nothing wrong with bananas cooked in butter and brown sugar.

But if you've ever made caramel, you know what happens next: the brown sugar and butter fused into the hardest substance known to humanity. So I madly try to scrape out the banana-caramel crust while it's still hot, and then scrub at the pan for an inordinately long time to get it ready for the making of the omelet.

At the beginning of this project, I declared I was going to follow the recipe as closely as I was able, either emotionally or physically. (I will never boil leeks for thirty godamn minutes again, for example. My feelings still hurt from that.) I was apparently so discombobulated by the banana-caramel slash pan fusion, that I utterly forgot to add the milk and rum -- yes, you read that correctly -- to the eggs. I have a friend's grandma's recipe for pie crust which calls for vodka, and is pretty good. But I legit can't see how rum would improve eggs, so I'm just fine with having forgotten it.

So then I melt a staggering amount of butter, pour in the eggs, and arrange half of the bananas down the middle. I tried to follow his instructions for cooking eggs, but they were so vague I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to be doing. I'm not going to ding Pol for this though, because I think how people cook eggs is weirdly personal? Both my husband and I can cook a mean omelet, but I think his method is madness and vice versa. And really, the omelet part, in terms of general coherence and presentation, turned out just fine.

My response to the first bite was, "This is confusing." My kid took a bite, somehow missing a banana chunk, so that was just eggs and not terrible. My husband took a bite and then spit it directly into the trash. I took another bite and then the true horror of the thing in my mouth hit me, like a cut with a sharp knife that only hurts when you see the blood welling.

The counterpoint of the consistency of the bananas and the eggs ... like I'm trying to come up with a word that means "aggressively mushy" because "mushy" on its own does not connote aggressiveness. I think these two thesaurus recommendations come close:

quaggy: resembling a quagmire; marshy; boggy; soft and flabby

pulpous: soft, yielding, and fleshy, or resembling pulp.

I am always happy to add funky words to my vocabulary, but honest to god, I could have forgone the method.

So! That was that. I scraped the remains -- maybe I should use the word carrion -- into the bucket for the chickens. They will for sure enjoy it because you can literally cut their heads off and they'll just keep on pecking.

[pandaspwnz]

Whoever decided it was a good idea to bake a pie on a fucking wednesday afternoon is a goddamn clown and should be dropkicked into the sun

[cxpperhead]

Off topic but when I'm writing those caring for a child prompts, this is the picture that's always at the back of my mind.