One More Chapter Down

Finished my mashed potato recipe for the book.

Excerpt:

The potato is a marvelous thing. By itself, it tastes a lot like air, but with even the simplest of seasonings, it comes to life and takes culinary flight, much like a character in a Red Bull commercial. The potato may seem quiet and unprepossessing, but it’s daring and versatile. The potato is ready for anything. It’s like a mousy girlfriend who likes having her wrists bound with her panties and her bare bottom spanked with a rawhide strap soaked in cinnamon oil.

You can make fries with it. You can make potatoes au gratin with it. Latkes. Gnocchi. Samosas. You can make sinfully smooth potato vodka that glides down your throat like a silken serpent and then sweet-talks you into singing "Santa, Baby" at the top of your lungs in a karaoke bar full of homophobic steelworkers. But enough about my holiday plans.

These days, people worry too much about adding lots of cutesy ingredients to their food. Your average modern cooking-school graduate has an encyclopedic knowledge of exotic ingredients which, combined in the proper proportions and carefully prepared, don’t quite succeed in masking a total lack of imagination and talent. You can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, but if you take her to the prom, they’ll still make you sit outside.

Some of the best stuff is the simplest. Biscuits have three ingredients: grease, milk, and flour. Ask the average cook to make them, and you end up with doorstops, hockey pucks, paperweights…everything but biscuits. And it doesn’t help if you tart them up with pumpkin meal or sun-dried tomato flakes or alpaca butter or tincture of yak phlegm. But get the proportions right, and a lowly wad of flour and pork fat can lift your tastebuds high above the clouds. Sort of like Christopher Reeve did Margot Kidder in the first Superman movie. You will imagine yourself soaring through the ionosphere under the arm of a tremendous biscuit in a shiny blue costume.

I have to run out and buy some cinnamon oil.