As I’ve mentioned before, my girl and I own a townhouse together, and as a child born in the 70’s, who grew up watching Alan Alda, Mr. Mom and Mrs. Doubtfire, society has tried to train me that I have a duty to help out around the house. During those same years, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks and Hunter Thompson taught me that, thankfully, that duty can technically be met by abdicating from urinating until I reach the bathroom or back door.
I am, of course, exaggerating; I’d rather have my urethra inverted by a length of razor ribbon than watch Mrs. Doubtfire. But I digress.
I am not, in any way, domestic. My ancestors didn’t drop from the trees, learn to use tools and invent Domino’s Pizza so that I would have to know how to cook. Hell, my ancestors had enough courteous forethought to invent condoms so I wouldn’t even have to know how to warm milk, or sober up, and who am I to spit in the face of their accomplishments by learning skills in the kitchen that might rob the hardworking Dunkin’ Donuts corporation of my daily five bucks? I was once excited about the idea of poaching eggs, but when I learned that it didn’t involve stealing from chickens, I gave up and went out for an Egg McMuffin.
When my girl and I moved into this place, the first thing I demanded was that we hire one of those maid services that will remain nameless. We factiously call them “The Mexicans,” but the names on the calling card indicate they’re Russian. They clean the place up, whimsically arrange my girl’s stuffed animals on the bed, and haven’t once threatened to blackmail me over the horrible things I don’t want the neighbors seeing me carrying that they’re forced to take out to the the dumpster…
…That is, unless the whimsical arrangement of stuffed animals is some form of old-school Soviet threat. I choose to believe it’s innocent fun… although I’ll up the tip to forty bucks and spring for opaque black trash bags the minute I find Snoopy decapitated.
The bottom line for the entirety of my adult life: home is the place where, when you go there, you don’t have to defend yourself to a bartender who’s twitchy about his liability insurance premiums. My attitude to what happens in my home is summed up in what is written on our kitchen’s blackboard wall.
Which has worked out up until now, because my girl cooks gourmet meals as a hobby (Ever eaten heart? I have. It tastes like filet mignon and the strength of my enemies), and I have Grand Theft Auto IV… and despite the best efforts of each of us to get the other interested in our respective hobbies, never have the twain met. End of line.
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A few months ago, after a Battlestar Galactica and Sam Adams marathon, my girl asked me what I wanted for my birthday.
“You know what I want?” I said, “I want a fucking bread machine. Because at this point, even the filthy Chinese place that deep-frys in Arco Graphite has stopped delivering, and we’re out of bread, and I’m about five minutes away from eating handfuls of peanut butter so I don’t need to get my stomach pumped.
“And I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and see congealed peanut butter all around my face and hands. Because that leads to furtive, guilty questions that nobody wants to have to answer after a blackout, even if you’re innocent.”
By the next day, I almost forgot about the whole exchange (Partially thanks to a note I found in the bathroom, written in eyeliner on toilet paper, reading, “It’s just peanut butter. Go back to bed.”), but my girl, who’s always looking for any angle to get me interested in cooking, had not. So when my birthday arrived, I found myself the proud owner of a Breadman Pro.
It looked like Artoo-Deetoo after an encounter with some pissed-off Jawas with lightsabers and an order to come back with the vig or the legs… and now it was sitting on my kitchen counter. It sat there for a few days like a synthetic indictment of my laziness, until my girl mentioned that she was making steak for dinner, and boy, wouldn’t it be nice to have some fresh bread and butter with the steak, and if I didn’t use the fucking thing at least once she wouldn’t wait until I owed someone the vig.
The whole project felt doomed to me; my girl’s made me watch the cooking shows where they make bread, and there’s like, seven steps that take five hours of hard manual labor that there was no way this crippled R2 unit was going to be able to handle, considering it was incapable of producing the simplest hologram of Princess Leia, even after I jammed the flashlight into it.
But then my girl said: “At least try it. Or tonight it’s the couch. The one in the parking lot of the Salvation Army up the street. Bread or Hepatitis: your choice.” She then left for work, and I grudgingly picked the simplest recipe in the machine’s manual, mixed the shit up, and set it to be ready when I got home from work. I figured that, at the very least, it would mix me up a batch of grey, coagulated goo that I could fling at the neighbor children while screeching, “See this? It’s the brains of the last kid who asked me to buy beer without offering the 200 percent markup! I need that money to buy a lawn I can tell you little bastards to get off of!”
When I got home from work, I came up from the garage, eager to get my hands on my homemade gack, and…
Have you ever smelled freshly-baked bread? I’m not talking about a just-opened loaf of Wonder, or even that crap packed with preservatives that you get from the supermarket, but stuff that started with yeast and flour and came to life in your own home? It smells like childhood.
Not my childhood, which smelled like Steak-Ums, scotch and impending doom, but some form of universal, American childhood, where Mom baked fresh bread while Dad read the paper and you came in from playing outside after school. That childhood is a myth of television; after all, Ma Brady was fucking Greg and Cindy was bending over in front of a super-8 camera for crack money while Dad Brady was out cruising for dick, but when you smell that fresh bread, you can almost believe it wasn’t something invented by that pederast Sherwood Schwartz.
My girl and I killed that loaf over dinner, and later, while I was inflating it in my stomach with beer, she casually mentioned, “You know, that was the simplest recipe in the world. There’s about a million other bread machine recipes that are just as easy on the Internet.” She said this sentence to me, who has such an addictive, compulsive personality that I smoked a cigarette both before and after I wrote it here.
My girl loves me, all evidence to the contrary.
In recent weeks, I have found myself voluntarily going into various supermarkets, for the first time in years, looking for ingredients for specialty loaves. It’s been so long that I no longer know how to behave in supermarkets, although my girl has given me some helpful etiquette hints, such as: “It’s not a good idea to shout things like, ‘Whaddya mean you don’t have rye flour? Jesus Christ, it’s easier to find skag in this fucking town!'”
I have eaten so much buttered bread in the past few weeks that I now worry that my heart may seize before my liver or my lungs pack up, which might scare you, but to me it just means that now we’ve got a real horse race going. And best of all, it placates my girl; She sees me as “cooking”, where I see myself “dumping shit into a machine that cooks for me while I play video games”. That bread machine is the motorized pocket pussy of the kitchen.
The only problem when you’re someone like me is explaining to people that you’re making bread. I tried to explain to my buddy Lance Manion at work that I’m not making bread, I have a robot that makes me bread. He smiled sadly and said, “No Rob, you have a robot that makes you gay.”
Well, fuck him. I get awesome food, and all the added bonuses therein. Not the least of which is leaving a bowl of rancid, stinking sourdough starter on the counter with a big sign that says, “DO NOT TOUCH: DISTILLING POLONIUM 210”.
Which should keep those fucking Russians from fucking with Snoopy for the immediate future.
[tags]Bread machines, cooking, dark humor[/tags]
