I say men make the best cooks. My wife says men make the biggest messes. What a sexist she is.
Fellow chefs, the time has come for men to take control of the kitchens in America and get women back in the malls where they belong. Gentlemen, start your turkey fryers.
What? You have no experience cooking? A lack of experience or knowledge of a particular subject has never stopped us before. Men rely on instincts. We don’t need maps, instructions, cookbooks or directions. Women don’t understand this phenomenon because they have no inherent instincts of their own, other than to somehow know that we are at Blarney’s Bar & Grill when we’re supposed to be in the back yard raking leaves.
I have been cooking for years, occasionally turning out a dish or two that was edible. Here are some tips.
Anytime you cook, get a little flour and spread it about the kitchen – on the floors, walls, cabinets and a little behind the toaster and on the windowsills. This is how a male chef marks his territory. It lets other male chefs know not to come messing around in your kitchen. A little flour in the bedroom doesn’t hurt, either.
There is one important rule that male chefs should commit to memory. Never do in one pot or bowl what can be done in three or four. If your recipe for Crow Cacciatore calls for one 9” x 13” baking dish, imagine how much better it will taste when you use two pots, an old Maxwell Hose coffee can, a blender, a meat processor, a Ronco Dice-Amatic and a Dutch oven.
Here’s another well-established male cooking principal. Cook everything rare. It’s the manly thing to do. You’ll get occasional complaints that the broccoli in the quail casserole was still frozen, or that one of the birds crawled out of the dish and escaped before it could be laced with gravy, but cook it rare anyway. They’ll get used to it.
Oh, and don’t forget this. A man should sample everything he is cooking, especially the sauces that involve a splash of bourbon. It’s particularly important to sample the bourbon throughout the cooking process, in case it suddenly goes bad. Some of my favorite dishes include bourbon and eggs, bourbon and meatloaf, bourbon and bologna sandwiches and – my favorite – bourbon and Jell-O.
Also, take this with you to the grave. Avoid health foods at all costs. Don’t even think about tofu, soybean milk or “no-fat” anything. If the recipe calls for some kind of pansy cooking oil – like coconut oil – use lard. You got to die sometime.
Finally, recipes are only guides, they’re not stone tablets from Mt. Sinai. So don’t pay that much attention to them. About the only thing they’re good for is to give a name to whatever concoction you’re working on at the time.
If you’re now convinced that you should give cooking a try, here’s a good recipe to start with. I call it “Damned Good Rabbit”. I named it that because there is an actual rabbit involved and it was damned good the last time I cooked it.
The hardest part about this dish is coming up with a rabbit. A pack of beagles helps, but very few chefs I know keep hounds anymore. This means the next time a rabbit darts in front of your car, don’t hit the brakes. Aim for the head so you won’t mangle his legs.
Here is the recipe:
Damned Good Rabbit
One rabbit
A Fifth of Early Times
Stuff from the pantry
Tongs (Very important!)
Lard
House Autry Chicken Breading
Milk
Secret Ingredient
Par boil the rabbit for about the amount of time it takes to drink two bourbon highballs. But sip, don’t gulp. Remember to put lots of stuff from the cabinet into the water before you boil it – stuff like onion salt, garlic powder, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, pepper and whatever stuff you see that looks good. Next, take the rabbit out of the boiling water. Yowl! Don’t forget to use the tongs. That’s really important.
When the fool rabbit finally cools off, chop it up into large pieces and get out three or four bowls. Fill each one with milk, dunk the rabbit in the milk, and then coat the rabbit pieces thoroughly with House Autry Chicken Breading and the secret ingredient. In a frying pan, heat a hunk of lard till it sizzles and drop the coated rabbit pieces into the sizzling fat. Don’t wear a really good shirt when you do this. Brown the rabbit on each side, cover the pot, turn down the heat to simmer and have yourself another drink.
About the time you finish that last drink and see how much money you lost that day in the stock market, your Damned Good Rabbit will be done.
By the way, I’d tell you the secret ingredient except that women would find out and then they’d be able to cook “Damned Good Rabbit” just as good as we can.