Posted on December 22, 2021
How I Almost Died
It was a dark and stormy Friday night. Except not really, but whatever. Just go with it.
I decided to put on my sweatpants when I got home after work, which were in my laundry room, sitting on top of a mountain of dirty clothes that was only getting bigger and bigger because I hadn’t washed anything in several days. Why? I’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s focus on the sweatpants. I just wanted to do a quick change into my fat clothes so I could relax for a while, so I went into the laundry room, closed the door, and put them on. Or tried to, anyway. What I actually did was lose my footing somewhere around mid-thigh on the first leg.
I started to fall but caught myself on the edge of the dryer. Or thought I did, anyway. Turns out, it was actually the dustpan that was resting on the edge of the dryer, and it was full of screws and dirt that went flying into the air as the dustpan itself flipped over and sent me plummeting to the floor. Face first, butt in the air, half-dressed from the left thigh down.
Lying there in total darkness because I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light, I slowly pushed myself up and brought my knees under my chest. Or thought I did, anyway. What I actually did was place the soft flesh of my naked right knee directly over one of the screws from the dustpan that I couldn’t see because of the total darkness, which had naturally fallen pointy-end up. I jolted from the instant pain, but my foot caught on the waistband of my sweatpants, and I somehow managed to propel myself forward. Headfirst. Into the back porch door.
I turned over, my tender bits scraping against unseen dust boulders and the occasional vindictive bit of metal, pushed my back up against the door, and slowly got to my feet. I switched on the light, then grabbed on to what I was confident, this time, was the actual edge of the actual dryer, steadied myself, and pulled my sweatpants back up my left leg. And then my right. Until I was fully clothed again.
I COULD HAVE DIED.
Now, you might be wondering why a dustpan full of screws and dirt was left resting precariously upon the edge of my dryer amidst a growing mountain of dirty clothes, and it’s a fair question.
Let me explain.
I have a very old dryer, which I love precisely because it is a very old dryer, and is, therefore, possible to repair whenever something goes wrong with it. New appliances are designed to fail and then be too expensive to fix, forcing you toward the cheaper route of just buying a brand new appliance before it, too, breaks down, and you’re forced to repeat the same horrible process all over again.
An old appliance, on the other hand, is fairly easy to repair if you know what you’re doing. The downside is that, because it’s an old appliance, it’s prone to breaking down, so you get to fix it a lot. This isn’t really a problem if, as I said, you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, I rarely know what I’m doing.
The dustpan that almost killed me earlier was holding the screws I had to remove from the back cover of the dryer after it broke down (again) several days ago. Fortunately, I realized that I didn’t know what I was doing as soon as I opened it, so I did what any good husband would do and just pushed everything back to where it was and told my wife it wasn’t really a problem because we still had plenty of clean clothes to go through before we’d need to wash anything again. (This was only partially true.)
Yes, we had plenty of clean clothes to wear, but most of them involved garments that were only clean because we never really wear them in the first place. If I didn’t fix the dryer soon, I knew I’d have to wear my old suit from 1997 to work, and nobody wants that. (Do people even still wear novelty ties anymore? Did they ever?)
After my unexpected education in gravity by way of complete sweatpants failure, I decided I should probably try to fix the dread machine. But remember, I had no idea what I was doing.
Nevertheless, I persisted…
The failure was actually pretty simple to diagnose. A little doohickey that holds a wire that slips into a thingamajig was to blame. Or, more specifically, the wire itself was to blame because it broke for some reason and was just hanging there. At any rate, I reasoned that a loose, dangling wire was a pretty good indicator of where the problem was.
I picked up the little doohickey, then got medieval on it with some pliers until I had freed the bit of amputated wire it still held tight in its little metal jaws. I then went back to the dryer, sat down on the floor, and began affixing the doohickey back to the rest of the wire that was still dangling inside the machine.
It was at this point that I realized I hadn’t unplugged the dryer. It was also at this point that I realized this one particular wire carried rather a lot of electrical current.
As I began to smash the pliers over the doohickey’s jaws to clamp them down upon the wire, the whole machine sprang to life like something out of a horror movie. I remember a very loud pop, followed by a slight metallic ping before a shower of really impressive yellow sparks flew off the wire in a kind of terrifying grand finale to my life. (Spoilers: I did not die at this time.)
I managed to stand up and, to my credit, very calmly remove the plug from the wall. I stood there for a minute, sniffing the rusty scent of ozone in the air while I surveyed the damage, which is when I heard The Child come running down the stairs, shouting and asking me if I was okay. I shouted back that everything was fine and not to worry. (Yes, I lied to my own child.)
Once reassured, the kid went back upstairs, and I went back to slaying my white whale. I found the doohickey that had been blown off the wire (the little metallic ping I heard was it hitting the side of the dryer), then I cut the wire back and twisted it tightly before crimping the doohickey back on, which I then tried to slip back into the thingamajig, only to discover that I’d cut back too much of the wire, and now it wasn’t long enough to plug in.
Undaunted, I traced the wire back through the bundled nest of other wires, removed it, and ran it straight to the thingamajig it’s supposed to plug into. There was plenty of wire now that it had a direct path, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I plugged the doohickey back into the thingamajig, then plugged the power cord back into the wall, stood back a safe distance, and pushed the start button.
Nothing happened.
At first, I thought I’d finally killed the machine, but then I realized that I might have only blown a breaker during the whole explosion incident. I checked the fuse box and realized I had, so I reset it and tried again. The dryer sprang to life. The heating element came on. Clothes began to tumble.
It worked!
I took the screws from the dustpan and used them to secure the back cover onto the dryer, then shoved everything back into place and began celebrating my victory by way of washing and drying every piece of clothing from the Great Mountain of Unclean Things.
Which was going great until the dryer broke again because hope is a fragile tinderbox, and the flame of joy is quickly extinguished in this cruel, uncaring world. (I was beginning to get depressed.)
After some time had passed and I was done feeling sorry for myself for being a failure both as a husband and a man, I realized that I had pushed the poor old dryer too hard. I’d just performed open-heart surgery on the thing, but hadn’t given it any time to recover before I put it back into active duty. I had only myself to blame. I took the back cover off and noticed that the same thing had happened again, which is when I noticed how brittle and discolored the far end of the wire was.
I unplugged the power cord. (This was, I had recently learned, an important first step in any repair job involving electricity.)
The wire looked and felt much healthier farther down the line, so I cut it back some more, then crimped the doohickey back around it before plugging it back into the thingamajig once again. I jammed the power cord back into the wall, then pushed the start button, and everything started working. I finished up the last two loads of laundry, and nothing at all exploded.
I considered this a great success.
Satisfied and feeling pretty good about myself, I thought it’d be a good idea to clean up before my wife got home, so I sanitized the crime scene to remove all evidence of how I almost died. Multiple times. In my own laundry room.
The moral of the story? Always remember to unplug whatever it is you’re about to work on before you start working on it, and always – always – put your sweatpants on very carefully.
Preferably under adult supervision.
UPDATE: We eventually bought a new dryer.
(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Posted on November 17, 2021
The Best Chocolate Pie Ever. In Like, the Entire History of the World. For Real.
My grandmother was a great cook. Or maybe she was a great baker. I’ve never really been clear on the difference. The point is, she made a mean pie and even baked cakes for a former First Lady.
True story.
She was also deeply devoted to following any recipe she found to the letter, with no deviation whatsoever. I get a little more experimental in the kitchen myself, which is how my mom’s secret Macaroni and Cheese recipe transformed from something reasonable yet tasty into the monster it is now. I won’t divulge my secrets here, but I will say that it involves a blonde roux just this side of brown, 16 ounces of butter, nearly a gallon of milk, and four pounds of cheese. Eating it might kill you, but at least you’ll die happy. (If you want that recipe, it might or might not be included in a cookbook I may or may not be working on. In the meantime, let me show you how to make gumbo. You’re welcome.)
As for the best pie you’ll ever eat – don’t worry, I’ll give you the recipe in a minute (or click here to jump straight to it if you hate words) – it started out as a simple, normal chocolate pie. There was nothing offensive or spectacular about it. It was just your standard, ordinary old chocolate pie. Serviceable, but the dial tone of the dessert world. My grandmother would make it, I’d eat it, and there was never anything particularly memorable about it.
But that was before…The Incident.
You see, the recipe came from my aunt, whose name was Turla for some reason, but who everyone just called Aunt Sissy. She was a sweet lady who never had much in the way of money or worldly possessions, so she’d always give out handmade gifts for the holidays. She’d carve and paint Christmas tree ornaments one year and hand out boxes of recipe cards she hunted-and-pecked together on a manual typewriter from 1920-something the next. She was a neat lady.
My grandmother first made the pie the year she got the box of recipes, and continued making it every year after that until she passed away. She always made it the same way, too: according to the exact measurements and directions of the recipe.
Until she messed up.
Like many of the world’s greatest scientific achievements, she created the best chocolate pie in the known universe entirely by accident. While attempting to follow the recipe the same way she always had, she neglected to properly read the amount of one key ingredient: the milk.
The recipe calls for one and three-fourths cups of milk, but my aunt’s old manual typewriter from the time dinosaurs roamed the earth squeezed the 1 part of the 1 3/4 cups all the way to the edge of the card. And my grandmother missed it.
Which is how the pie was born.
By only adding 3/4 of a cup of milk, the pie took on a whole new dimension of chocolatey goodness. It was rich and thick, and more decadent than that slice of cake in the second Matrix movie that made a nice lady have to leave the table over accidental indecency in the workplace. Anyway, it was, in short, the best chocolate pie I’d ever tasted. My grandmother, however, was horrified. She thought she’d ruined Christmas with a defective pie and was convinced that I was just being nice when I stopped her from throwing it out and starting over. I wasn’t. It was delicious.
My dad and I ended up modifying the recipe a bit more over the years, from the standard rules of baking that involve always adding more vanilla than a recipe calls for and a little more salt to any dish that has chocolate in it, to more extreme measures like changing the pie crust from a boring old regular crust to an Oreo cookie crust that can inexplicably only be found at Walmart these days.*
*Yes, this pie actually makes me want to go to Walmart, which is saying a lot.
Now, as promised, I’ll share the recipe with you. Make this pie for your next family gathering or work party, or just any time you want to impress everyone around you. One word of caution, though. If you do make this pie, you should probably double the recipe and make two of them. They go quickly.
I’m only modifying the amount of milk here, and I changed the margarine to butter, because live a little. It won’t kill you. Probably.†
† I hereby absolve myself of all legal responsibility if eating this pie makes your heart explode.
I also suggest adding a little more vanilla‡ and an extra pinch of salt, but I’m not here to tell you how to live your
life. Oh, and if you want to be extra, make your own whipped cream. It’ll impress your in-laws.
‡ Just double it. If the butter doesn’t kill you, you’ve already made it through the scary part.
The Recipe
3/4 CUP SUGAR
1/2 TEASPOON SALT
1/3 CUP FLOUR
3 TABLESPOONS COCOA
3/4 CUP MILK
2 EGGS, SEPARATED
1 TABLESPOON BUTTER
1 TEASPOON VANILLA
Mix sugar, salt, flour and cocoa together, then add milk, beaten egg yolks, and butter.
Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. (The pie has a tendency to go goopy if you don’t cook it long enough. So watch for that.)
Remove from heat and add vanilla.
Beat egg whites until stiff, but not too dry, then fold into the custard mixture.
Pour into an Oreo pie crust and chill in the refrigerator until firm.
Top with whipped cream and grated chocolate. (Or chocolate sprinkles. Whichever you prefer. You do you.)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)
Posted on February 9, 2021
Authentic Cajun Gumbo: It’s Okay To Cheat
I like checking out YouTube and the rest of the internet every now and then, just to see how wrong some people can get their gumbo recipes. I don’t know why watching abject failure is fun for me, but at least I limit it to gumbo. There are worse ways to pass a few minutes, you know.
Oh, hey. Before I get into a long, involved story about the time a bowl of gumbo saved my life when I was a Dickensian street urchin working the coal mines, you can skip straight to the recipe here. You’re welcome.
I’m all for quick and easy gumbo, though. Cheat Gumbo, you can call it. You don’t have to make your own roux if you don’t want to. You don’t even have to chop your own vegetables or cook any chicken. There are ways. Sadly, most of the methods you’ll find on the internet are just too lazy.
Everyone knows the key to cooking up a great gumbo is the roux. The reason purists will tell you it’s important to make your own isn’t because slowly cooking up your own oil and flour combo is better than using someone else’s pre-cooked oil and flour combo. In the end, the roux will pretty much taste the same.
Nope, the difference is what you do with the roux. If you make your own, what you do when it’s ready is toss in your holy trinity (onion, celery, bell pepper) and saute those veggies right in the roux since it’ll be roughly the temperature at the heart of a dying star at that point. That’ll flavor up the roux and the veggies, and you’ll have a great base to build the rest of your pot on.
However, what almost everyone on the internet says to do with jar roux just makes my heart sad. They all want you to dissolve it in boiling water and then dump all your raw ingredients into the pot after its boiled for a couple of hours or so. No. No, no, no. You can make a pretty decent watery gumbo-flavored soup this way, but no. You’re not making Gumbo with the capital G. You gotta earn that.
My way is less lazy but just as easy, and you’ll end up with a very flavorful stew, like how Gumbo should be. (See? Capital G right there.) Here’s how.
Buy you some store-bought roux. I like Savoie’s, but really, it’s all just oil and flour anyway. Buy whichever one you want. (If you get to making your own roux, you can use vegetable oil if you want, but never use olive oil. I don’t care what the cooking show chef on your talking box said. Don’t do it. Also, if you want a really great roux, use bacon grease or lard for your oil. Trust me. Equal parts oil and flour, cook over medium heat stirring constantly until you get a rich, chocolate color. Simple.)
Toss that roux in a big pot you’re gonna cook up the gumbo in. I use a whole jar for my pot, so the rest of this super easy recipe will follow that. Add a little oil to it if you need to (jar roux will be very, very dense and dry) and put it over a low heat, stirring constantly until it’s all smooth. After that, keep the heat on low and stir it regularly while you do the next steps. (The reason jar users don’t saute their vegetables in the roux is because it’s already cooked and pretty easy to burn if you try to bring it all the way up to temperature from the get-go. That’s why I bring the roux up slowly over a low heat while I do the other stuff.)
The sausage! Use whatever sausage you want. My favorite won’t be your favorite, so pick what you like. I recommend a sausage that tastes red because sausage that tastes too brown just screws everything up. (Shout out to all my synesthesia folks out there who understand what I’m talking about.) Cut it into thick slices, dump the slices into a separate pan, and brown them up on both sides. (The Maillard reaction brings out extra flavor.) When you’re done with that, dump the sausage into a bowl or some other kind of temporary container.
Stir that roux a bit.
Without taking your now empty pan (except for some grease and a bunch of bits stuck to the bottom) off the heat, toss in your veggies (or, if you want to be extra lazy like me, you can buy a “seasoning blend” of veggies in your grocer’s freezer section that’ll be just fine as long as it’s got onions, celery, and bell peppers). Dump in the whole 24oz bag, and cook them until they’re nice and cooked down and soft. Nobody wants crunchy veggies in their gumbo.
Stir that roux a bit.
When you dump the veggies in the sausage pan, the moisture will deglaze it and bring all that goodness up that was stuck on the bottom. You should also have plenty of grease from the sausage to cook up the veggies. (All this adds flavor, you know.)
Stir that roux a bit. Go ahead and turn the heat up to a low medium while you’re at it.
When your veggies are ready, dump them a little at a time into the gumbo pot with the roux. Stir it all together, then add a little more. (If your roux starts to seize up on you, just add a little oil.) Keep stirring the veggies in until you have all you want in there. (I usually have, I dunno, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of a cup left over.)
Stir the roux and veggies up a minute, then dump in the sausage and stir it all together. Now add a couple of boxes of chicken stock. Just dump it in, stir everything around, and make sure everything is all nice and smooth and the roux has completely dissolved.
You should season up the liquid now with some salt and pepper. Don’t add any “Cajun spice” blends, though. That’s just dumb and you don’t need them. Instead, add a couple of teaspoons of filé to the pot and stir it up. (It’s just ground sassafras. Nothing fancy.) The filé will not only flavor your Gumbo (ooooh, that capital G is back now), it’ll also help thicken it a little to just the right amount. Maybe start with 1.5 teaspoons, although you can always add a little water to the pot later if it gets too thick.
When you got that done, try and get at least three pounds of meat off a few fully cooked rotisserie chickens, shred it, and toss it in the pot. (Or buy at least three pounds of chicken thighs and boil them in water with salt and pepper, some dried oregano, a couple of bay leaves, and half an onion (no need to chop it). Boil them about 20 minutes, then take them off the heat and let them sit in the water another 10-15, then pull them out and shred them with a couple of forks. (If you want tastier chicken and have the time/energy, just season your thighs and brown them in a pan, finishing them off in the oven however you normally like baked chicken.) But if you’re really lazy, just pick up some thighs from Popeyes, take the skin off and chunk them into the pot.
I like to add some finely chopped garlic just before I toss in the chicken, by the way. I don’t saute it first because it’ll be plenty hot enough to cook it in the pot, and I want the flavor that comes from tossing it in this way. If you’d like a more mellow garlic, saute it first or just sprinkle in some garlic powder. I don’t care. Some people like to add a bay leaf at this point because I guess they think it does a damn thing, so go on ahead and do that if you want to plant a tree in your pot. I don’t think it brings anything to the party though, so I don’t invite it to mingle.
Anyway, now all you gotta do is let that simmer (bring it to just below a boil, then turn the heat down to a low simmer) for however long you want. The longer you go, the more flavor you’ll get, but it’ll be ready to eat whenever you decide you can’t wait anymore. (And it’ll be even better the next day and the day after that and the day after that…)
If I’m gonna put rice in my gumbo, I like to serve it on the side to add to my bowl as I go. Honestly though, rice is just a stretcher to make thin, watery gumbo last longer and serve more. My Gumbo is thicker – but not too thick – and is more of a rich stew, so you really don’t need the rice. Have some if you want, though. I’m not the boss of you.
Okay, now here’s the quick version for everyone who just jumped straight to the bottom of the post for the recipe. You jerks.
Chicken and Sausage Gumbo
Lazy Cheater’s Recipe
- 1 16oz jar of dark roux (or 2 cups oil and 2 cups flour; protip – bacon grease is great; or use Bacon-Up)
- 1 24oz bag frozen seasoning blend (onions, celery, bell pepper)
- 2 pounds of sausage, sliced (you can add more, but not less)
- 3-5 pounds of chicken (again, you can add more, but not less – also, I recommend boneless, skinless thighs)
- 96 ounces (three 32-ounce boxes) chicken stock or broth (you can grab an extra box to have on hand if you need more liquid, or you could always just add some water)
- However many cloves of garlic you want, finely chopped
- 2 teaspoons gumbo filé (or a lot more, if you prefer — I go with a lot more)
- Bay leaves
Cook your chicken first, however you like – or you can get some fully cooked rotisserie chickens and use those. I like chicken thighs, myself – boneless, skinless. You can cook them in a pan, in the oven, on the grill, however you like. Just remember to season them first. Once cooked, just shred them with a couple of forks or, if you spend too much time on TikTok, use a hand mixer on them. There are no rules here.
In a large pot, add the jar of roux and maybe a little oil (if you want to stir it a little more easily before it’s heated up) over low heat, stirring constantly until smooth. (Stir occasionally after that, while you do the next steps.) If you’re making your own roux and you’re not experienced, you might want to save this step for after your sausages are done.
Cut sausage into slices and brown in separate pan. When browned on both sides, remove from the pan (but leave the grease), put it in a temporary container and set to the side.
In the same pan you used for the sausage, saute seasoning blend (onions, celery, and bell peppers) until well cooked and soft.
(If you’re making your own roux, do it now.)
Add veggies to large pot with roux a little at a time, kind of like you’re tempering chocolate. Add sausage to pot and increase heat to medium, stirring constantly.
Pour in chicken stock. Stir until roux dissolves completely. Season with salt and pepper. Add chopped garlic and filé, then put down that jar of “Cajun spice” I know you’re about to try and sprinkle in there. I can see you. Trust me, you don’t need it. Just stir your pot.
Add chicken, bring to just below a boil, then reduce heat and simmer with a couple of dried bay leaves until you can’t stand it anymore. The longer the better, but I’ll understand if you just can’t wait.
Eat.
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