My New Year's Eve dinner...1984...true story
It's 2012 and amongst other things I noticed about this younger generation is that they cannot cook. If the food package that they buy doesn't say microwavable, heat and serve or just add water...they are absolutely lost in the kitchen. Now I'm not saying that everyone in my generation was great cooks. In fact, I know we had some bad ones. But they were fewer and farther in between than the young people today.
Mostly the women cooked in my family and my entire neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City. I mean my mother was such a prodigious cook, that her and her girlfriends from the neighborhood would literally cook food for our whole apartment building (14 stories high, 9 apartments per floor). We would have cooking days where the kitchen would be on lock down for an entire day or even a whole weekend. Thanksgiving in my neighborhood was truly a feast, as you could die from over eating when you went from house to house.
I'm not too sure if this current generation of young women (or men) could handle cooking good food on a large scale like that. Throwing them in a kitchen and telling them to cook fresh meats and poultry for at least 50 or more people, might be akin to watching Lindsey Lohan taking a drug test 20 minutes before her next court appearance. It just is not happening.
I dare you to hand a young woman in her late teens or early 20's three unfrozen, whole chickens and tell them to do their best. I bet their first reaction would be to reach for the microwave door handle or fill a small pot with some water. It's a shame. They wouldn't even know when or where to start to add some seasonings.
That being said...and since I've picked on this younger generation enough...it's time for me to recall the kitchen cooking antics of a girl I once dated in college, way back from the Fall of 1984 to the Fall of 1985, which was basically my freshman and sophomore years. To protect the lives of the innocent, which are the other people involved in this story (all of whom are still friends with me today - with exception to the ex-girlfriend) - I will be using fake names.
Freshman year, one of my endearing female friends I shall call Pat, introduced me to one of her girlfriends from her hometown in Queens, NY, as a means of bringing together two good people. I shall call this ex girlfriend, Kelly. Yes, Kelly and I hit it off right from the start. She was cute, she had a great laugh, she thought everything I said was funny and super intelligent...including pronouncing my own name (that should have been a hint). Not for nothing, but Kelly (fellas are you with me on this) had an hourglass figure. She was a natural athlete, who looked like she worked out everyday, but hadn't even picked up as much as a paperweight. That always mystified me. And she knew how to dress stylish and sexy when we went out! I used to think that her sometimes vapid moments in thought processing was...a put on...but I eventually learned...that it wasn't an act.
Now I had a roommate back then. His name was...let's say...Tony. Tony was a great guy, friend, roommate, brother...way back then...and still to this day. Tony has a tremendous sense of humor and he and I always had great chemistry. Well, after Kelly and I started dating, she picked up on this and began secretly planning things to do for me with him, which she presumed was without my knowledge. Nope. He told me everything. Then she charmed her way into my family, and would have long conversations with my mother about me to find out more about me. Nope. My mother told me everything (she also encouraged me to hang in there with Kelly).
As the Fall semester drew to a close in mid December, Kelly invited me, our mutual friend Pat and her date, Rob to a home cooked dinner on New Years Eve. She was going to surprise us with her world class culinary skills. Now at this point, on some weekends during the semester, Kelly was barley cooking passable breakfast meals for me at school. But, she talked very confidently about her baking skills. She was 18, had a solid upbringing, nice family, mother, father and older sister. Between that and our mutual friend Pat, I just figured breakfast just wasn't her thing. My first cooked meal was breakfast for my family at age 11. I can still rock a kitchen for morning breakfast (or dinner) to this day.
Anyway a few weeks goes by and low and behold, it is New Year's Eve and Pat, her date, Rob and myself are all gathered Kelly's house for this late night dinner, and small glass of wine to celebrate the New Year...1985! Everyone was nicely dressed. We were all college students behaving like responsible young adults. Okay...well...maybe not 100% squeaky clean, with her parents and older sister gone for the evening. But we did our best. What I remember most about that evening is that we were ALL HUNGRY as Kelly made us all swear that we wouldn't eat a morsel after 3pm that day, so that we would be near starvation for her baked chicken dinner later that night.
Sure enough, time had passed and as we neared 9:30pm, we kept asking when dinner would be served. So Kelly went back in the kitchen to check on this dinner that would be fit for kings and came back out, saying "Something is wrong. It's been cooking for over 2 hours and I think something isn't right." Well, that's when Pat and I pulled the oven door open and looked at our chicken. The 2 hour chicken was as white as a ghost. The freaking thing was albino! Clearly Kelly didn't really season it well...and she had been cooking it on too low a temperature (250 degrees F). At that rate, Rob and I were looking through the Yellow Pages to order some Chinese take out food. But in support of her girlfriend, Pat talked us out of it. So the two girls did some food doctoring - and that poor old chicken was sent back in the oven to cook some more.
About 90 minutes later, the ghost chicken had now cooked to a traditional, healthy golden brown. The plates were set, the vegetables served, the countdown to 1985 grew near and four hungry young people sat down at the dinner table to finally eat! I was given the carving knife and serving fork to do the honors of cutting the first pieces of chicken for everyone at the table. Well, after several moments of everyone staring at me (and each other) like the gunfighters do in the old Clint Eastwood "Spaghetti Westerns"...I bravely picked up the knife and fork and drew first blood. No, I mean...literally first blood. The first two pieces I cut were bleeding so bad I immediately yelled "Medic! Medic!" and applyed hand pressure where I just wounded the still alive chicken. There were several distinguishable screams from poor Pat and Rob, as blood spatters hit them like in the "chestbuster" scenes in the Alien movie.
Needless to say we went vegetarian that New Year's Eve. We knocked off the wine and even chased it down with some of Kellys father's beers in order to drown out our sorrows from the bloody horror we witnessed at the dinner table.
By the time we got back to school a month later, my roommate and floor mates knew the whole story. My birthday was coming up in a few weeks in March. And undeterred by her New Year's Eve fiasco, Kelly decided to bake me a cake and had the unimaginable audacity to tell my roommate and floor mates that she was going to bake me a cake. A cake? A cake? She couldn't bake a chicken, and now she wants to bake me a cake to share with my friends at school?
A few weeks goes by...and low and behold "surprise" here comes my cake! Delivered to my room with all my floor mates present. The cake was flat, not fluffy. It resembled unleavened bread with chocolate icing on it, more than it did a cake. Tony cut up a couple of slices and we all pretended to get ready to eat it. But we waited for her to leave the room. Once the coast was clear, we wrapped the rest of the cake up in aluminum foil and played floor hockey with it using our feet. And would you believe it, the damn cake held up longer than the aluminum?? So we threw the remainder back in our room refrigerator to help keep it balanced (the fridge was missing 1 of 4 footings). It remained there until move out at the end of the spring semester....
My message to all parents...teach your kids how to cook!
It's 2012 and amongst other things I noticed about this younger generation is that they cannot cook. If the food package that they buy doesn't say microwavable, heat and serve or just add water...they are absolutely lost in the kitchen. Now I'm not saying that everyone in my generation was great cooks. In fact, I know we had some bad ones. But they were fewer and farther in between than the young people today.
Mostly the women cooked in my family and my entire neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City. I mean my mother was such a prodigious cook, that her and her girlfriends from the neighborhood would literally cook food for our whole apartment building (14 stories high, 9 apartments per floor). We would have cooking days where the kitchen would be on lock down for an entire day or even a whole weekend. Thanksgiving in my neighborhood was truly a feast, as you could die from over eating when you went from house to house.
I'm not too sure if this current generation of young women (or men) could handle cooking good food on a large scale like that. Throwing them in a kitchen and telling them to cook fresh meats and poultry for at least 50 or more people, might be akin to watching Lindsey Lohan taking a drug test 20 minutes before her next court appearance. It just is not happening.
I dare you to hand a young woman in her late teens or early 20's three unfrozen, whole chickens and tell them to do their best. I bet their first reaction would be to reach for the microwave door handle or fill a small pot with some water. It's a shame. They wouldn't even know when or where to start to add some seasonings.
That being said...and since I've picked on this younger generation enough...it's time for me to recall the kitchen cooking antics of a girl I once dated in college, way back from the Fall of 1984 to the Fall of 1985, which was basically my freshman and sophomore years. To protect the lives of the innocent, which are the other people involved in this story (all of whom are still friends with me today - with exception to the ex-girlfriend) - I will be using fake names.
Freshman year, one of my endearing female friends I shall call Pat, introduced me to one of her girlfriends from her hometown in Queens, NY, as a means of bringing together two good people. I shall call this ex girlfriend, Kelly. Yes, Kelly and I hit it off right from the start. She was cute, she had a great laugh, she thought everything I said was funny and super intelligent...including pronouncing my own name (that should have been a hint). Not for nothing, but Kelly (fellas are you with me on this) had an hourglass figure. She was a natural athlete, who looked like she worked out everyday, but hadn't even picked up as much as a paperweight. That always mystified me. And she knew how to dress stylish and sexy when we went out! I used to think that her sometimes vapid moments in thought processing was...a put on...but I eventually learned...that it wasn't an act.
Now I had a roommate back then. His name was...let's say...Tony. Tony was a great guy, friend, roommate, brother...way back then...and still to this day. Tony has a tremendous sense of humor and he and I always had great chemistry. Well, after Kelly and I started dating, she picked up on this and began secretly planning things to do for me with him, which she presumed was without my knowledge. Nope. He told me everything. Then she charmed her way into my family, and would have long conversations with my mother about me to find out more about me. Nope. My mother told me everything (she also encouraged me to hang in there with Kelly).
As the Fall semester drew to a close in mid December, Kelly invited me, our mutual friend Pat and her date, Rob to a home cooked dinner on New Years Eve. She was going to surprise us with her world class culinary skills. Now at this point, on some weekends during the semester, Kelly was barley cooking passable breakfast meals for me at school. But, she talked very confidently about her baking skills. She was 18, had a solid upbringing, nice family, mother, father and older sister. Between that and our mutual friend Pat, I just figured breakfast just wasn't her thing. My first cooked meal was breakfast for my family at age 11. I can still rock a kitchen for morning breakfast (or dinner) to this day.
Anyway a few weeks goes by and low and behold, it is New Year's Eve and Pat, her date, Rob and myself are all gathered Kelly's house for this late night dinner, and small glass of wine to celebrate the New Year...1985! Everyone was nicely dressed. We were all college students behaving like responsible young adults. Okay...well...maybe not 100% squeaky clean, with her parents and older sister gone for the evening. But we did our best. What I remember most about that evening is that we were ALL HUNGRY as Kelly made us all swear that we wouldn't eat a morsel after 3pm that day, so that we would be near starvation for her baked chicken dinner later that night.
Sure enough, time had passed and as we neared 9:30pm, we kept asking when dinner would be served. So Kelly went back in the kitchen to check on this dinner that would be fit for kings and came back out, saying "Something is wrong. It's been cooking for over 2 hours and I think something isn't right." Well, that's when Pat and I pulled the oven door open and looked at our chicken. The 2 hour chicken was as white as a ghost. The freaking thing was albino! Clearly Kelly didn't really season it well...and she had been cooking it on too low a temperature (250 degrees F). At that rate, Rob and I were looking through the Yellow Pages to order some Chinese take out food. But in support of her girlfriend, Pat talked us out of it. So the two girls did some food doctoring - and that poor old chicken was sent back in the oven to cook some more.
About 90 minutes later, the ghost chicken had now cooked to a traditional, healthy golden brown. The plates were set, the vegetables served, the countdown to 1985 grew near and four hungry young people sat down at the dinner table to finally eat! I was given the carving knife and serving fork to do the honors of cutting the first pieces of chicken for everyone at the table. Well, after several moments of everyone staring at me (and each other) like the gunfighters do in the old Clint Eastwood "Spaghetti Westerns"...I bravely picked up the knife and fork and drew first blood. No, I mean...literally first blood. The first two pieces I cut were bleeding so bad I immediately yelled "Medic! Medic!" and applyed hand pressure where I just wounded the still alive chicken. There were several distinguishable screams from poor Pat and Rob, as blood spatters hit them like in the "chestbuster" scenes in the Alien movie.
Needless to say we went vegetarian that New Year's Eve. We knocked off the wine and even chased it down with some of Kellys father's beers in order to drown out our sorrows from the bloody horror we witnessed at the dinner table.
By the time we got back to school a month later, my roommate and floor mates knew the whole story. My birthday was coming up in a few weeks in March. And undeterred by her New Year's Eve fiasco, Kelly decided to bake me a cake and had the unimaginable audacity to tell my roommate and floor mates that she was going to bake me a cake. A cake? A cake? She couldn't bake a chicken, and now she wants to bake me a cake to share with my friends at school?
A few weeks goes by...and low and behold "surprise" here comes my cake! Delivered to my room with all my floor mates present. The cake was flat, not fluffy. It resembled unleavened bread with chocolate icing on it, more than it did a cake. Tony cut up a couple of slices and we all pretended to get ready to eat it. But we waited for her to leave the room. Once the coast was clear, we wrapped the rest of the cake up in aluminum foil and played floor hockey with it using our feet. And would you believe it, the damn cake held up longer than the aluminum?? So we threw the remainder back in our room refrigerator to help keep it balanced (the fridge was missing 1 of 4 footings). It remained there until move out at the end of the spring semester....
My message to all parents...teach your kids how to cook!
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