The Incompetent Cook

Sandwiches are awesome by themselves, but are even moreso when said sandwich is a panini sandwich. Why? Because panini is Italian for “awesome.” Then again, what else would you expect from a sandwich that has requires its own specialized appliance? Since I am not only an incompetent cook but a penniless bum as well, I cannot afford specialized appliances and have to improvise a bit when making my own paninis.

Bearing that in mind, behold: directions for an incompetently made panini sandwich.

Step 1: Go to the store and get yourself some panini bread.

Step 2: Get a George Foreman grill. If you already own a George Foreman grill, you may skip this step though if you care at all about George Foreman’s financial situation, you won’t.

Step 3: Plug in your George Foreman grill and wait for it to heat up.

Step 4: While waiting for the grill to heat up, put some deli turkey and shredded cheddar cheese up in a loaf of panini bread and fold it over.

Step 5: Stick that mess into the grill and close it.

Step 6: Wait for five minutes. While you wait, as he has no doubt be intrigued by your activities, play with the cat.

Step 7: When sandwich is done, open the grill and admire the grill marks on the sandwich.

Step 8: EAT A DELICIOUS SANDWICH.

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In addition to being an incompetent cook, these days I am also an unemployed bum. Consequently, there is not much money to spend on things like halfway decent ingredients for… well, anything.

Despite this, my body still expresses a strong desire to eat on a regular basis. To satiate my never-ending hunger, I spend most of my days trolling the aisles at the supermarket searching for things that are 1: edible and 2: on sale. Imagine my surprise when I happened upon this find – a entire bag of onion rolls on sale.

Thanks to generosity of the day-old basket of baked goods, I will have the sustenance required to fuel me for just a little bit longer. Yes, onion rolls will reduce the likelihood that anyone will want to kiss me, but it seems that being both an incompetent cook and/or an unemployed bum lead to fewer opportunities to be kissed. Strange, I know.

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I thought I had my crouton issues solved.

I thought that my forays into the world of crouton-creating would never again be written about on this blog.

I thought that I was mature enough to get up from my video game when the alarm went off on the oven that signaled the completion of the crouton-cooking cycle.

I thought a lot of things.

The moral of the story: don’t play video games while baking croutons.

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Last week, I realized I was out of chili powder. Being the kind of guy who restocks things I’m out of that I will need at a later date, I bought some more.

Two days ago, I thought I was out of chili powder and bought another container of the stuff, completely ignoring the fact that I had purchased another one just a few days prior.

So, here I am with two full things of chili powder. What the hell am I going to do will all of it? Be warned: the next few months may be filled with stories about recipes involving chili powder.

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Look at it. Gaze upon it. Admire it.

After two unsuccessful attempts, I have finally produced a loaf of bread worthy of being consumed.

That’s right, loaf of bread. I’m going to eat you. Yeah, I’m talking to you. I don’t see any other loaves of bread around here, do you? No, I didn’t think so.

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Nothing could be easier to make than croutons, right? They’re basically nothing more than toasted chunks of bread, right? All I have to do is follow the recipe, right? There is no way that even I could mess this up, right?

To the left, please observe my first attempt at making croutons. Both trays were prepared in precisely the same manner,went into the oven at the same time, and were removed at the same time.

So why is it that the batch on the right turned out fine and the batch on the left was burnt to a crisp? The best reason I can come up with is that the pizza pan is less conducive to properly baking croutons than the cookie sheet is, but that’s more of a guess than anything.

As always, The Incompetent Cook has no answers, only questions. But that’s a good thing, right?… right?

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I made some blueberry muffins.

No horror story this time. Instead, I will savor the sweet, sweet taste of success. And I’m not joking about the “sweet” part: there’s almost a cup and a half of pure sugar in these things. Which is what makes them awesome.

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After my initial failure at baking a loaf of bread, I could have given up and returned to the world of store-bought bread. That is what a sane person might have done. Fortunately for this blog, my grasp on reality is tenuous at best and I gave this whole breadmaking thing another shot.

Loaf number two turned out decently – it didn’t rise as much as I had hoped it would, but it gained enough volume to be edible. Also, I dusted it with too much flour so the final product looked like it had survived a violent hurricane inside of a cocaine warehouse or whatever type of edifice it is that they normally store illegal substances in. I refuse to accept responsibility for this mistake and will instead blame the recipe for ordering me to “dust the loaf with flour.” Since I don’t know how to dust, I changed the recipe to “throw flour at the loaf,” and since there was no specified amount of flour with which I was supposed to dust the loaf with, I decided it should be “a shitload” which is much more than “a pinch” but far less than “a metric fuckton”.

I sliced the loaf up into big hunks and topped them with some deli meats and cheese. Upon taking the first bite, I noticed that the crust was crispy, the inside was acceptably soft and that raw flour is disgusting. Really. That stuff is gross. Trust me on this one.

And the quest for the perfect loaf of unkneaded bread continues.

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Because I am insane, I recently had the thought that it would be a good idea for me to attempt to bake my own loaf of bread from scratch. Never mind the fact that I’ve never worked with raw bread dough before, didn’t have the proper equipment and had no one to teach me about this whole “kneading” and “yeast” and “having the proper equipment” business – I had a loaf of bread to bake, dammit!

I mentioned this on Twitter or Facebook or one of those other things that the kids are using to communicate these days and a friend pointed me towards a recipe from the New York Times for No Knead Bread. No kneading required? Nice. This took care of my lack of kneading ability as well as my tendency towards laziness in general in one fell swoop. This was going to be easy.

Unfortunately, that’s when my tendency towards laziness kicked in. One of the ingredients listed in the recipe was “instant yeast.” My slacker brain read that as “yeast” and, since I had some active yeast in the cupboard, into the bowl it went. Besides, there’s no difference between yeast and instant yeast, right? For those of you who can’t stand the suspense, I’ll let you know right now: this totally screwed up my bread. For those of you who like suspense, please ignore the previous sentence.

After mixing everything and letting it rise overnight, I came back to my bowl of raw bread dough and read step two of the directions. Generally, one should read all of the directions contained within a recipe before actually attempting to make whatever you’re trying to make but I’m a busy man who doesn’t have time to read a four-step recipe in one sitting. The second line of step two read:

Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it.

A work surface? Big enough for this entire blob of dough? Crap.

I have no counter space large enough to work with this entire mass of flour and yeast, so I had to improvise with the largest cooking surface I own – my wok. Yes, my stir-fryer of vegetables and delicious meats was going to be used in manner its maker had never intended: as a prep board for a baked good. At least this road bump would motivate me to finish reading the rest of the directions, right? For those of you who can’t stand the suspense, the answer is “no.” For those of you who like suspense, please watch a movie by Alfred Hitchcock because we all know my story is not going to have a happy ending.

After working the dough over a bit in the floured wok, I shaped it into a ball and threw it back into the bowl for another two hours. Then I came across this:

Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats.

“Honey,” I said out loud, “do we have a heavy covered pot of some sort in which to cook bread?” There was no reply because I live by myself like a crazed loner with a cat so in retrospect, I’m not sure who I was talking to. Realizing that I had no one to respond to my query, I dug around the kitchen for a bit before discovering I did indeed lack a heavy covered pot. So, off to the store I went.

Once I returned, shiny new red enameled steel cooking pot in hand, I took a look at the dough. It was supposed to be ready once it had doubled in size. It hadn’t doubled in size yet. Why hadn’t it doubled in size? It had been two hours!

I picked up the recipe off of the counter to review it and at that point, the camera to the movie of my life zoomed in tightly on my face and the music got dramatic as it finally dawned on me that I had used the wrong yeast. Active yeast, it turns out, is not as active as instant yeast. I was about to criticize the yeast for being a bunch of lazy bums but decided against being a raging hypocrite and instead threw the dough into the pot and took my chances.

The result?

You know how bread usually comes in loaves? Mine ended up more as a discus. And you know how bread usually has a soft consistency? Mine ended up with the consistency of a discus. And you know how people normally keep their loaves of bread around and eat them? I threw mine away like a discus.

Yes, I am an incompetent enough cook to mess up the world’s easiest bread recipe. Fortunately, I am insane enough to try again.

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