I’ve never thought of myself as simply a ‘food writer.’ That’s because prior to September 8^th, I had never written about food. But I sense dozens of  readers clamoring for more, so here’s a companion piece to “Meatloaf Muffins.”

 Yesterday, I had a thought I’ve never had before. I thought, “I wonder where my other whisk is.” Now, I’ve lived most of my adult life without so much as one whisk, so this thought surprised me, but now that I’m teaching myself to cook, a lot of strange thoughts cross my mind. And yesterday, one of my whisks was in the sink, so I needed the other one.

When I moved into my apartment to start my life over…again, the friends who knew that I was an aspiring foodie gave me their ‘extras.’ Mostly, I got a lot of utensils. Sure, I coulda used a basic cookbook, since I didn’t really know how to cook, but jesus, do I have a lot of long plastic things with handles. If you need something stirred, or scooped, I'm your guy. Oh, and I have a tube thingie with edges, that I think is used for…making things into a tube shape.

So many spatulas, so little time. By the way, looking at this picture is making it hard for me to finish this piece, because I’m a little OCD and I want to straighten the drawer. I won’t, but I really want to. I’m serious—the handles of my saucepans are all at the same angle in the cupboard. And my salad dressings in the fridge are arranged alphabetically by country of origin—French, Italian, Russian, Spanish…never mind.

I also got a Crock Pot (capitalized, because this is actually ‘the original slow cooker’), a George Foreman Lean Mean Cooking Machine, and some sort of mystical electrical device that apparently conjures up omelets. Or empanadas. I’m not sure. I’ll just keep putting things into it until I figure out its purpose.

One friend gave me a bunch of spices. Now I may be a gourmand nouveau, but it's not like I'm not hip to spices. Your salt, your pepper. I've even been way out on the edge and used garlic salt, and lemon pepper. But now I have coriander, and cardamom, and sage! To be honest, I don’t even know what cardamom is, let alone whether I want to add it to my food. And the only experience I’ve had with sage was when this roommate used to light a big stick of it on fire and wave it around the apartment to cover the smell of weed before a visit from his parents.

 Clearly, I just got my first digital camera, because now I’m just taking pictures of various spices. It’s not like this picture makes what I’ve written any funnier.

Although I'm not quite fifty years old, my digestive tract is pushing seventy, so I have to be a little more careful about what I eat (in fact, there’s a good chance that as you’re reading this, I’m in the bathroom.) For instance, I’m very skittish when I cook meat. If the recipe says 375 degrees for 45 minutes, I tend do a little more for a little longer. My chicken might be a little dry, but at least it’s salmonella-free.

I’m lucky to have a couple of friends who I can call if I have novice questions. You know, like, “If I’m out of eggs, can I use mayonnaise as a binding agent since mayonnaise is sorta made from eggs?” (The answer, surprisingly, is no.) I recently learned that, even though you see flour in a lot of recipes, simply adding it to something ‘as an experiment’ is not a good idea, since apparently, without yeast, flour just ends up being this weird, warm powdery substance on top of the dish.

I have a hard time with shopping. I want to eat more vegetables, but living alone, I never seem to use the fresh veggies I buy quickly enough to prevent them from going bad (‘When Good Lettuce Goes Bad’—A 48 Hours Investigation). I think scientists should genetically engineer bachelor-sized heads of lettuce. Not a priority. Just when they finish the other stuff they’re working on.

Every time I think about going strictly vegetarian, I realize I can’t do it. I’m sympathetic to the ethical arguments, and the argument about resources, and I think there are verifiable health benefits. And as soon as the people at Boca make the tofu equivalent of a luscious, marbled, butter-knife tender chateaubriand, I’m on board. I think my friend Steve put it best, when he said, “I’ll stop eating animals when they stop killing them and packaging them for me.”

The worst part of shopping for me is that I look at ingredients now. Take something as simple as bread. I know multi-grain bread is a good thing. But how many grains exactly? Is twelve too many? Five doesn’t seem like enough—what do those other seven grains have that I might need? Maybe a good nine-grain. Wait—this bread has flaxseed! Do I need that?—is that one of the nine, or did they leave that out? Shopping takes me hours.

Well, I’ve been reading some cookbooks lately, and I think I’m ready to post my first recipe. This one involved multiple steps, AND at one point I was using three of my four burners at the same time. Let’s see now—a brief description of the ‘vibe’ of the dish, list the ingredients, describe the cooking part, show a picture of the finished product... piece of cake—or more accurately, a piece of………………

 Random Shit in a Pyrex Dish

This is a dish that would be perfect for a chilly afternoon, when you’re out of pretty much everything because you’re too lazy to leave the house but you still need to eat something.

Ingredients

• a chunk of ground beef
• a little bit of olive oil
• a big-ass white onion you meant to use in something else and didn’t realize you still had
• one Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage
• one-half package of Manischewitz brand wide egg noodles
• bag of flour
• some garlic powder
• a little too much celery salt
• a handful of bread crumbs
• a few globs of Paul Newman’s Vodka Sauce
• two cigarettes

First, disconnect smoke alarm. Then, begin to cook noodles according to package directions. Remember you have noodles cooking.

Next, chop some of the onion into really tiny pieces. Apply bandage to cut on finger. Throw onions into a bowl with the ground beef and the vodka sauce. Add garlic powder and too much celery salt. Add bread crumbs. Decide you didn’t need the bread crumbs. Too late. Mix by hand. Yuk. To a big hot skillet, add olive oil and ground beef mix. Sorta cook the beef, but not totally.

Light first cigarette. Your noodles are done now. You forgot about them, didn’t you? Take them off the burner. Drain noodles in colander. Place in Pyrex© dish, carefully and evenly layering them. Layer beef on top of noodles with the big spoon with holes in it so that you don’t add all the goop from the skillet. Now use that spoon to mix up the two layers because you’re worried the beef won’t get cooked enough unless it’s evenly distributed. Scatter remaining bigger pieces of onion on top of dish.

Put away bag of flour, since you didn't actually need flour. Place dish in 350 degree oven for at least 45 minutes. Light second cigarette. Decide you should put a foil tent over the dish, because you heard something once about using a foil tent. Watch latest episode of ‘Flash Forward.’ Realize it’s been almost an hour. Take dish out of oven.

This really tasted much better than it looks.