Travellers Tales 2012: And Then The Cops Showed Up

I’d like to think that I am a competent griller. That, when presented the task of cooking up some animal I am capable of producing a good product. Granted, I do not grill like most people. I usually put foil down to keep the juices from leaving the surface. That and when visiting rental houses on vacation, I have no idea what has been on that grill, so I’m not too keen on grilling directly on the grill plates. It’s kind of like using a toilet seat cover in a public restroom.

That being said, all good vacation stories should include the phrase, “And then the cops showed up.”

On Sunday, I took turns making dinner and grilled up 15 steaks. We had 13 people at the house, three of which were under the age of seven. Still, we could make those leftovers disappear on Friday, which is “mustgo” night.

So, of course, I put down foil on the grill and cooked up the steaks with ease. There were two gas grills on the upper deck of the house, right off of the kitchen. It was a little odd to have the grills on a deck, let alone on the top floor. Worse yet, the wind whipped against that side of the house, making it hard to keep the grills lit. Halfway through, one of the propane tanks kicked, forcing me to finish up with all of the steaks on one grill.

nom... nom... nom... nom...

There was a spare tank that appeared to be almost empty, but we tried to hook it up and all it did was hiss gas. So, I called the realty company and asked about it. They sent a guy out, Monday afternoon, with a spare tank. He looked like a typical local; older gentleman, long blonde hair with a handle bar mustache. Somewhat of a cross between Nick Nolte and Hulk Hogan. He confirmed that it looked like a bad regulator on the other grill.

Now, on Monday night, my buddy decided to cook up hamburgers and hot dogs. He made his own patties with ground meat they had brought down from home. He made these huge patties with thumbprints in them. They were sort of falling apart. Perhaps they were too thawed or the 80/20 split on the fat percentage was too much leaving them a bit greasy. Still, they were patty shape and he threw them on the grill, sans foil.

He had various issues with grilling. The patties began crumbling and in flipping them, the bottoms of the burger seemed to peel off and leave a slice of meat stuck to, and in between, the grill surfaces. Large chunks of greasy, uncooked meat began falling down into the grill box. In all, the burgers came out OK and tasted pretty good. But when it came time to grill up the hot dogs, I suggested putting foil down, just in case.

After throwing the dogs on the grill we went back in to wash our hands and refresh our beverages. That’s when someone noticed black smoke floating passed the kitchen window. I then started repeating the word, “Grill. Grill! GRILL!”

We walked back out onto the deck and black smoke was oozing out of the grill. I opened it and it all went out like the Smoke Monster on LOST. The dogs were a little black from all the smoke, but more importantly, the greasy meat on the burners had ignited.

I reached down and turned off the burners. Then, I reached down and turned off the gas. Next, against my better judgment, I let my buddy pour water into the box on the various hot spots. Fire was out. Dogs were burnt… on the outside… and then the cops showed up.

Whoops



Well, that’s not exactly true. They drove past. Then, they drove back towards the beach. Then they drove back up the road and did a three point turn. I wondered what the hell they were doing. I then realized we were the house that was called about. It was about the time I said, “They aren’t coming here are they?” Apparently, our neighbors across the street felt we were going to set the entire house on fire because of a little grill fire. I then went inside and informed everyone that I was going down to talk to the cops. Hide the moonshine… (It wasn’t really shine. It was more like wine. Actually, I’m not sure what it was because it froze in the freezer.) In any case, I didn’t feel like spending a night in a North Carolina holding cell with illegal hooch. I told everyone to be on their best behavior.

I walked outside and met the officer who asked if we were grilling. I said, “yes” and said that the fire was out and all was well. She asked if they could come in and look to be sure. She said they’ve had one too many houses burn down because of this kind of thing. I obliged and her and an older gentleman entered.

She asked if the grills had been moved. I said they were like that when we arrived and that I was unhappy about the location. They checked out the place and all looked good. As we stood on the deck overlooking the driveway, about six more vehicles showed up including an ambulance, another truck with a dog in the cab, and a couple more police cruisers.

I don't know if the dog drove but he came along on the call.

I asked, rhetorically, if all of those vehicles were for this call. The office said that they were and that more were on the way.

“I don’t have that much food to go around.”

She laughed and they went back down. About this time, the entire house was cracking jokes and pointing fingers at me and my buddy. The proverbial icing on the cake came as the last vehicle pulled up to the house. It was a fire truck and who should jump out but PROPANE MAN!

Unreal. The guy that was there two hours ago to drop off a propane tank was now pulling up to our house in a fire truck. I can only imagine what was going on in his mind. “OK. Another fire call. Here we go! Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, dear God, no! I just… OK, be cool. Maybe nobody will notice.”

They pretended to put handcuffs on him. Somebody noticed. So, I went down to jag him as well. “I swear to God we didn’t do it!” I yelled. His response, “I told you not to use that f**ing grill!”

Putting Propane Man in Cuffs

In all, the fact that we managed to get the majority of Currituck County Emergency Services to show up on our doorstep was enough to make this trip memorable.

I was hoping to have the Coast Guard show up by Friday.

Next up… make sure you check those tidal charts before you go out for dinner.

I'll Never Cook Again

This declaration was made after my daughter’s birthday party this past weekend.

It’s not that I cook, now. I know. And even if I did I could hear the naysayers… saying nay…

- nay saying…

- naying?

- bitching at me and my wife for not cooking four only child’s birthday. Well, nay away. Here’s why it was a blessing to not have to cook.

For the past three years we have been having cookouts for my kid’s birthday. It’s the day after Independence Day which usually means it doubles as the official holiday cookout or gets moved to a nearby weekend to avoid the work week. Usually, we do the usual grilling fare, and I spend four hours grilling up food as well as taking care of things like wayward children, filling up coolers, etc. Normally, my wife and I do not get to enjoy the party.

This year was especially daunting as we tried to offset the scheduling conflicts of family and friends by moving it to the week after the fourth. That gave us extra time to clean, shop, etc. Still, we both looked at each other and wanted to cry.

We’ve been having issues with our pool. It’s one of those Intex brands one that I inherited from my brother. He bought a new pool and I got that one. The pump/filter that comes with it couldn’t cycle a 50 gallon fish tank properly. The pump barely sucks enough water to get a flow going and the paper filter cartridge suffers from poor design issues as it never fits right, leading to the pump not working properly. So, I had been in the market for a better pump since last year.

One of my old teachers from high school happened to have a Hayward DE pump and filter. It was a couple years old and hadn’t been used for a year. I bought it for $200 along with various parts and fittings over Memorial Day. With a vacation at the beginning of June we didn’t get it set up until the middle of the month. Now, I must say that because I’m an idiot and didn’t have a proper cover, the pool remained exposed to the elements all fall and winter resulting in lots of leaves, bugs and dirt residing in it.

Trying to clean a 16 ft. pool with even a more powerful than needed pump/filter is going to be hard. If I would have just resigned myself to draining and refilling the pool, I would have saved myself two weekends of screwing around with trying to keep the pump working.

Needless to say, I finally got it up and running, properly, on the Fourth of July weekend. That left me with a week to get everything else done. That meant yard needed cut, house needed cleaned and food needed to be bought. It was just too much for us to handle.

My wife made the executive decision at the beginning of the month to just get the party catered. Is that lazy of us? I say no. Is that frivolous of us to spend the money? I say no. Here’s why.

In the scheme of things we would have ended up paying the same amount for all of the food and then cooking it ourselves. Because we were cooking it, we would have lost time that we so desperately needed to run around and pick up supplies, the cake, the balloons, and anything else needed. We’d also find ourselves taking longer to eat as you can only prepare so much food ahead of time, leading to later meal times and less time for enjoying the other stuff.

We went with a local place called Skis and Nick’s. I’ve had their food before and it’s pretty good. We ordered one of their predefined menus which included batter dipped chicken, penne noodles and sauce, a potato, a vegetable, a deli tray, a garden salad, a fruit salad, rolls, buns, and relish tray. At $9.25 + tax, per person it might sound like a lot. However, we also got all of the napkins, plates, utensils, condiments and carryout containers to go with it. Not to mention, they included the use of a hot box to keep the hot items hot. Now, all I had to do was go pick it all up, uncover it and serve.

By the way, the food was delicious. We had leftovers which was great because we were dead tired yesterday and didn’t want to have to worry about dinner. And, we got to visit, eat and enjoy the party, for once. Like I said, we’ll never cook again for parties.

You Can Never Have Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen

There’s an old saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth. It can also be worded as having too many Chiefs and not enough Indians. Of course, I have no idea how you can connect Cleveland Major League Baseball to Kansas City professional football and relate that to cooking.

That was a joke…. Never mind.

Bad jokes aside, the idea that you need to have a small amount of management and an ample amount of direct reports is the idea behind those sayings. In other words, too many people in charge leads to discourse among how to best serve the project. But this isn’t about business, this is about actual food. This is about literally having too many cooks in the kitchen and I say, so be it. The more the merrier.

As my waistline will attest, I do have a small love of food, but will leave its preparation up to the experts. I am otherwise pretty useless in the kitchen. I am constantly reminded how I screwed up beans and weenies in a can. What did I know? I was trying to make it better. I was a bartender. We experiment, sometimes. [crickets] For the smallest part, I think my wife would just be happy if I remember to put stuff back in the fridge. Small steps, right?

But theOver the years, I have gotten better at it and on occasion I will even do some of the cooking. I’ll make French Toast, chili, grill dead animals and can make a pretty decent scrambled egg. However, in my life I have known many great cooks and I stand by the mantra that having too many cooks can never be a bad thing.

More than one cook can split up the workload. Just last night, my wife and father-in-law tackled kitchen prep inside while I manned the grill, outside. We had some leftovers from a birthday party cookout that consisted of a three beans and bacon dish, sausage stuffed banana peppers, hot dogs and hamburgers, which were reheated and pasta salad and fried green tomatoes, which were fresh. Now, as a grill warrior I am constantly working to improve how I can grill hot dogs, hamburgers, and steak and I have found that nothing bothers me more than having dried out burgers from putting them back on the grill. So, here’s a little tip for anyone who has left over hamburgers and wants to cook them up the next day.

There is an awesome spice made by McCormick called Grill Mates. I already love their Montreal Steak Seasoning one for…um steak. Whenever I get some steak for grilling, I use a combination of the Montreal Steak Seasoning and Meat Tenderizer before it gets on the grill and the add some black pepper once it’s close to being done. They also make a hamburger spice which is ‘effing awesome. But it also works if you are reheating burgers as well. Depending on the number of burgers you are using, grab a brownie or cake pan and add some beef broth, I use Swanson, and the Grill Mates Burger Spice. Put your burgers in and cover it with foil. Put it on the grill and just let it simmer. The burgers stay juicy and moist and the added flavor from the spice is kick ass. The beef broth idea came from my mom, another great cook.

So, while I’m standing outside watching meat cook, my father-in-law is inside slicing up green tomatoes, coating them with salt, pepper, and flour and frying them up. While he’s doing that, my wife is mixing up pasta salad and heating up the peppers and beans. Teamwork y’all. Yet, this was mostly food that was already made ahead of time. What about the food that needs to actually be cooked?

While I am primarily biased towards my own family’s cooking there were few things I would actually eat and didn’t leave my comfort zone all that much. For instance, before I met my wife I had hardly ever considered putting brown sugar into spaghetti sauce. I also did not eat chili before my father-in-law made me an addict. Now, I make it using his recipe and it is one of my favorites. Salad consisting of apples, raisins, walnuts and mayonnaise? No thank you… until I met my wife. Now, I could eat a whole bowl of Waldorf Salad, by myself.

Sadly, we are down one awesome cook this year. Dinner is bittersweet as my wife is beginning to learn how to cook all the dishes, her mother was so good at, in a trial by fire method. I will say that she’s nailed broccoli cheese soup. That was always something she had trouble getting her mother to make the way she liked it. Our gold standard was Ruby Tuesday’s but we don’t have one around here anymore. Holiday cooking will be equal doses of sweet and sour as that was always a favorite time of year for my mother-in-law’s cooking. Sure I had some of the best sweet potato casserole and stuffing at my family’s house for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve belonged to my wife’s family. Without the matriarch at the helm we will all have to figure out how to pull off some of the more excellent fare we’ve been used to.

To be fair to my wife, she had been taking on the duties of cooking for Halloween and New Year’s Eve ever since we moved into our home in 2004. But she always had an extra cook in the kitchen to help out and I know there will be times that she’ll unknowingly reach for the phone to call her mom. For her it was life and family. For me it was work. Her mom and I worked together and, up until last year, we’d email each other throughout the day about stuff. She had retired almost a year before she died and every day I’d relate some new tale of the office to her because she understood the culture. Like my wife reaching for the phone to ask for advice on how to make something in the kitchen I still have times where I wish I could email her or call her to tell he about the latest event. But we will move on, eventually, I guess.

Even though I am not one of the many cooks that should be in the kitchen, I still think we need to recognize that these holiday meals, that we loved so much, need to continue in her honor. I’d even be willing to learn how to cook some of them in order to keep up the tradition. I don’t think it’s an attempt to move on and forget someone who made a huge impact on our lives… and my gut. I think it’s a chance to honor that person’s memory by continuing what they did so well, if only as much as our expertise will allow. There will, of course, be some recipes and styles that will be lost because we didn’t take the time to get all the information before she passed. We had no idea it was going to happen. But we’ll experiment and test and try new things and along the way we may discover new ideas to pass on to our child and her eventual family. Well, I hope so. There’s just so many ways you can serve a slice of cheese and ketchup, which seems to be her favorite meal. Honestly, she doesn’t know what she’s missing, except the weight I’ve put on since I met her mother. What can I say? I love cooking and the cooks who cook so well.

Dear Food Network, Hire Me

As much as I enjoy watching Giada De Laurentiis… cook, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps there needs to be a show for the idiot in the kitchen, like me. After all, one of my first cooking endeavors had me trying to be creative by putting some vanilla into a pot of beans and weenies. There was brown sugar in there. I thought it would be a good idea. I didn’t know one iota of cooking basics and have yet to live that incident down over the last ten years. So, for the dumb ass in the kitchen I think there needs to be a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously and has a lot of fun while being informative. Think "Tool Time" with skillets and whisks instead of power tools.

I am a married with family and we very rarely cook. My oven and stovetop are pretty much storage. Even the microwave holds items. It’s kind of like the equivalent of having a Nordic Rack which is a Nordic Track or other piece of exercise equipment that is utilized as a place to hang laundry on after it comes out of the wash. But, I can make some dishes. I can make spaghetti and even jazz up the sauce from a jar without resorting to vanilla extract. I can make chili from a recipe I could only get from my father-in-law after I married his daughter. I do pretty good French toast and some other baked goods, but real meals escape me or at least the motivation to make them does. I guess that I am more kitchen lazy than kitchen incompetent….hey that’s a good idea for a title.

So, here’s my unsolicited pitch. You’ve seen talk show hosts like Dave Letterman have someone on to make something and he spends more time screwing around and drinking the cooking sherry, straight from the bottle, than actually preparing something so let’s go with that idea. I would be the host of a cooking or home show that dispenses more tips on “What Not To Do.” It’s like Martha Stewart with knuckles dragging across the hand knitted rug.

Each week I would have a theme and actual chefs would come on to cook a meal and show me how to do it. Meanwhile I would bet totally inept and would make jokes or break a lot of stuff, this would not be a struggle in the acting department for me. During the cooking segments we would have two dishes being prepared, one by the pro and one by the putz, me. At the end, we compare to see what it should look like and what it probably will look like. I want truth in advertising here.

Now, there are guy type shows on The Food Network but do we really need to see Guy Fieri going for the ole 96er eating speed record. Not to mention, I don’t use product. I’m just your average idiot who doesn’t know the difference between jam, jelly, or preserves. The draw and attraction to the show would be the honesty with which I would truly screw up dishes. In fact, I expect there to be a lot of broken dishes and food splashed around so that it looks like something exploded in the kitchen. Granted, a lot of this will be done for effect. Also, I like to be able to interject a sense of Pop Culture trivia, sort of like an Alton Brown delivery with very little important information. I would love to devote entire shows to recreating recipes used in movies and television shows.

But why would anyone watch such idiocy when they could be tuning in Paula Deen and learning how to make hoecakes. Because Paula would be a guest and I’m sure her and I would have a huge amount of fun going back and forth. My only hopes would be that the guest chefs would not take themselves too seriously on my show and it would give the audience a chance to see their favorites cut it up and have fun. I expect a food fight at least once a month….maybe when Giada shows up.

Of course, I know I can never realize this pipe dream. I wouldn’t last one three minute egg’s length of time on Iron Chef. They’d have to rename it cheap ass aluminum foil chef for me. I couldn’t go onto a cooking show competition and expect to wow and dazzle anyone but wouldn’t it be funnier if the guy hosting the show was so ridiculously incompetent that he would have three fire extinguishers on the set and a fire marshal on speed dial?

Come one TFN. Why not dumb it down for those of us who think that Semi Homemade with Sandra Lee should still have a Le Cordon Bleu degree as a prerequisite. Think about it, Home Improvement was more popular because of the antics that Tim Taylor would get himself into rather than the home life. Here I would be the Bob Vila of the kitchen. Did you ever notice that they never let Bob do any dangerous work? And how can you resist having a show on the air that could or could not end in the Emergency Room every week. There should be a warning in front of the show like on Jackass. In fact, there’s an automatic drinking game built into the show from the first episode.

• Take one drink every time the host uses too much of an ingredient.
• Take one drink every time the host uses the wrong ingredient.
• Take two drinks every time the host pronounces something wrong (no lie, I was in Applebee’s once and ordered the Tuscan Chicken and called it Tucson Chicken. I thought it was a South Western dish)
• Take two drinks every time the guest has to control the host’s attention.
• Take three drinks every time the host swears and gets bleeped.
• Take four drinks every time the censors miss it.
• Finish the bottle if the paramedics or EMS is called.

So, write your congressman or go bug Rachel Ray or something. Start a petition, update your facebook status to read “If you believe my friend Mongo deserves his own cooking show because I want to see him catch on fire, at least once, add this to your status for an hour.” Do the work for me because I’m too busy leveling up my café on Facebook. Get on the ball and get me on TV. Think of the carnage and wonderful dishes we can bring to your home.