On Cooking

If all these cooking shows and competitions on TV are any guide, the world is now populated with men who can cook.  

And they’re good, these Jamies and Gordons, Adams and Michaels.  They can tell a paring knife from a potato peeler, a puree from puff pastry. They know it and they show it.  As your mother used to say, they can cut the mustard. 

It’s not so around my house. 
Come dinner time, and the chef is wearing a skirt and making it look easy.  She pulls neat little packages of a dozen sausages, 10 hamburger patties or six lamb chops out of the refrigerator and pops them into a pan or the microwave. Dinner is under way.

This past week, without a wife, I set out to replicate this routine.  I’d seen more than one of these cooking shows. How hard could it be?
There were, I need to tell you, just two items left in our refrigerator.  One was quite possibly the remains of the dinner I’d tried to cook a day or two earlier. It was now wearing a fur coat and green eyeshadow.  

The other item was a 100 kilogram block of frozen Woolies chicken.  It may have still been on the forklift pallet on which I’d bought it, but with all that ice, how can you know? The more important question is this: how does a mere male turn this Everest of frigid poultry into dinner in the seven minutes before Home and Away starts?

I’m glad you asked.  Such occasions are a test of our manhood, gentlemen, and I’m here to tell you how it’s done. 

First off, you’ve got to drag that chicken out to the curb.  Make sure you use your wife’s best tea towels, because you don’t want freezer burn.  That, I believe, is the first rule of cooking.
Holding the chicken over the edge of concrete curb, you whack it – this is a culinary  term – whack it with a framing hammer.  Some of you will prefer a two kilogram masonry mallet, but I like the Estwing. It has a good weight, great balance, and a very pretty blue handle. 

So, two or three whacks, and as the great chefs of Europe would say: Voila!  We have ourselves a chunk of chicken we can chuck into the Panasonic.

Still can’t quite fit it onto that glass turntable thing? Time to drag out the big boy, that Stihl chainsaw you’ve been saving for a special occasion.  Strap on the Alaska edition, carbide-tip all-purpose blade, and away you go. 
I know, you’re saying. But Mike, isn’t that going to leave a raggedy edge on the chicken?  And I say to you, yes, but just watch the marinade soak right in.

That’s right, a marinade. It’s now pretty clear that I have been paying attention to MasterChef and Jamie Oliver and the rest. I do have some talent in the cooking department. 

In the glow and hum of the microwave, I see a television series in my future.  There’ll be a series of Cookbooks for Men to go with it. 
I even have titles for the first couple:  Mike’s Cooking with Power Tools, followed by Tenderizing Tenderloin with an Impact Wrench. I imagine Preparing Favourite Desserts with a Welding Torch will be very popular here in Australia.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I don’t want to replace my wife in the kitchen.  I just want her to know that I could, if necessary. 
And if I wasn’t so busy with my new cooking show.