Kitchen Mishap #1

Hey guys to make you fell better about yourselves why don’t I make a list of all the ridiculous mistakes I make in the kitchen? Let’s call it kitchen mishaps. This is likely the first of many: On a recent Saturday morning I was making Huevos Rancheros, preparing to start the salsa by cutting up some jalapenos. I know, as a person who has injured himself before, that the seeds are the spiciest part of the pepper. But I was feeling comfortable - I’ve chopped a lot of these recently without any issue.

This time however, while cavalierly tearing out the seed spines with my hands, I let loose a cloud of invisible toxic dust, effectively pepper spraying myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever been pepper-sprayed but it’s a pretty aggravating sensation. Not as bad as the time I sprayed habanero juice into my eye, but the pain was stubbornly intense, setting off a wild chain of events that ended with Kara swabbing milk on the inside of my nose. I tried to inhale that milk to clear out my upper nasal passages and although it helped a little the feeling of liquid spurting up into the lower regions of my brain was equally unpleasant. The eggs were ok. By then it was pretty hard to taste anything.

First Post

I’ve unleashed a lot of nonsense on the internet in my time, but now, for your delight and approval, I am beginning POMME IMPROVEMENT, a cooking blog, which will combine delicious, exciting recipes with culinary high-jinks and a few choice curse words.

This is an expression of love and passion. Ideally, I think I would enjoy being a chef, but I know this could never happen, because I am easily distracted and have the manual skills of a four-year-old with Parkinson’s disease. My pacing in the kitchen is a disaster. Last week I melted an entire grill brush (guess how), and I have melted many other things in the past. To draw the obvious parallel, my kitchen presence is akin to that of the lovable Tim Taylor on television’s Home Improvement: roaring ambition paired with partial technical incompetence and a penchant for disaster (I almost called the blog GRUEL TIME).

Yet despite the burning agita I get every time I have to deal with a simmering sauce and sautéed spinach and a whole chicken in the oven, I try to cook as often as possible. I take on complicated recipes that I have no business messing with, partially as a challenge and partially out of some desire to fail spectacularly at making a soufflé. Deep-seated control issues assure that I will try to create everything from scratch, meaning I will make my own ketchup or pastry dough or gravy. This also means I tend to leave the kitchen looking like a bomb has hit it, but somehow, though sheer persistence or divine providence, the things I cook (usually) turn out ok. That’s what this blog is about. It’s also about avoiding frozen pizzas, saving money and demystifying the art of cooking, which, as long as you use fresh, basic ingredients and are prepared to devote some time, isn’t really that hard. And I promise there will be pictures the next time I set something on fire.