Greetings from the Third Circle of Hell, formerly known as Gluttony. Now simply called The Kitchen.
If time spent in the garden is gold, time spent in the kitchen is that nasty base metal (that turns your skin sickly green) in mercury-laced trinkets made by child laborers. I learned another hard lesson recently and because I’m feeling Oh so generous, I thought I’d share it with you.
I grew up with “sloppy joes.” Ace suckled at the teat of “s*%t on a shingle” in the backwoods of Northern MN. Regardless, nothing says Make America Great Again like a good old vat of pink slime simmered in a packet of something and then dumped on a squishy bun that turns to pure glucose by the time it hits your soft palate.
The palates in our domicile are a bit particular so I actually used a recipe. I’ve made it before and it’s good. Here it is. I generally follow recipes, even mostly exactly. The first seventeen times I made this, I followed the recipe exactly. Except I substituted some ground pork and ground turkey for the beef, used garlic-infused olive oil instead of avocado oil, ditched the green pepper in favor of red, slopped on whatever mustard I could find in the fridge, and utilized an unlabeled red substance I dug out of the freezer in place of “7 oz organic tomato paste.”
For whatever reason (Jupiter in retrograde, cruel fate, or Satan smirking from the Ninth Circle), I paused to consider Ace’s handwritten note on the recipe. “If uis one – no veed % matle BBQ savle 5epanite.” I put it through Google Translate Ace –> English and got “If this one – no need to make BBQ sauce separate.” Oh. Great!
I dumped everything into our cast iron beauty: three pounds of ground meat, peppers and celery, spices, and a boatload of water.
Which brings me to today’s hard lesson: Always brown the meat first. Even if your spouse’s illegible scrawl implies one-pot all-at-once cookery, always brown the meat first.
Our sloppy joes have the consistency and appearance of Toddler Turd post ingestion of a pound of cherries, three cans of Fancy Feast, and a Miralax milkshake. I’m sure they’ll be delicious.
Musical Moment – oops. Got sidetracked by an orange Pomeranian.
Real Musical Mo-
(one hour later, after Hope For Paws doggie rescue video, watching an emu egg hatch, metal detecting in Hawaii, etc)
Musical Moment (The Mac Miller ((rip)) x Pharrell project entitled PINK SLIME wasn’t fit for familial consumption.)