The year ended with a near-miss cooking catastrophe.
Fortunately, the Cubanos turned out fine, but there was a trio of little fires – figuratively speaking – to contend with during the process of appeasing the tastebuds of our New Year’s Eve company.
In the kitchen, figurative fires are preferred to literal fires since there are no actual flames to quell. At least, I had that going for me on New Year’s Eve 2023 – no need to stop, drop and roll.
All guests were familial so there wasn’t any real pressure. If food complaints were aired, I was prepared to accept our guests’ critiques in a healthy, non-defensive manner. Pfft. Who am I kidding? I planned to respond, “Shut up and eat your s*&$ on a shingle!” Say that five times quickly. What a great tongue twister, if not an apron slogan!
I never aspired to be a professional chef. A culinary arts career seemed too intimidating. What Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly was warning enough: “You really, really, really want to be a chef? If you’ve been working in another line of business, have been accustomed to working eight-to-nine-hour days, weekends and evenings off, holidays with the family, regular sex with your significant other; if you are used to being treated with some modicum of dignity, spoken to and interacted with as a human being, seen as an equal – a sensitive, multidimensional entity with hopes, dreams, aspirations and opinions, the sort of qualities you’d expect of most working persons – then maybe you should reconsider what you’ll be facing when you graduate from whatever six-month course put this nonsense in your head to start with.”
But I do aspire to make Cuban sandwiches (or Cubanos) now and then, thanks to inspiration from a favorite food-themed motion picture, Chef, starring Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, Scarlett Johansson, and Sofia Vergara (the latter being the only actress alive who can make Scarlett Johansson look homely). Cuban sandwiches are featured throughout this breezy, fun, heart-warming food truck movie.
For our year-end meal, I marinated a pork loin with orange juice, pickle juice, lime juice, brown sugar, salt, garlic cloves and olive oil (as guided by Southern Living) and refrigerated it for 10 hours, then slow cooked it five hours via crockpot. The pork loin’s tastiness makes or breaks a Cuban sandwich.
Thin slices of black forest ham (the other pork in this double-pork concoction) sizzled on the griddle. Then the panini press put the big squeeze on the loin, ham, yellow mustard, Swiss cheese, and French bread (its crust lathered in butter). There should’ve been pickles … but more on that catastrophe shortly.
I don’t consider myself to be a good cook. My wife tells me otherwise, knowing it will encourage me to spend even more time with recipes so that she can do other things. In return, she obligingly cleans the messy aftermath, fully aware of my diehard belief that the messier one makes a kitchen, the tastier the meal. A thorough house cleaning is as therapeutic for her as precision spice measuring is for me. We are simpatico in this yin and yang way.
While creating the Cubanos, I cluttered all available kitchen surfaces with tornadic zeal and listened to loud Latin-based grooves streaming from New Orleans’ WWOZ (these call letters are the reason God invented radio). Most notable, the always ear worthy Pete Rodriquez singing I like it like that … I like it like that … I like it like that …
Naturally, the mere thought of Cuba conjured Hemingway, who famously said “courage is grace under pressure,” likely basing this machismo theory on personal experiences involving war, bullfighting, multiple divorces, and/or mojito hangovers.
When you get down to it, a Cubano is nothing more than a glorified ham sandwich. It’s a high-maintenance meal that doesn’t require any sort of courage to make. Still, I had to demonstrate “grace under fire” while making them last Dec. 31.
Three unexpected things happened: 1) I accidentally dropped the pickle jar, which shattered on the floor, thus losing a key ingredient. 2) While picking up wasted pickles, sweeping shards of glass into a dustpan, and soaking up green juice with a mop, I witnessed water dripping from the ceiling due to an overflowing, upstairs commode. Hurdling cats, rushing upstairs, I soon found myself in a crazed state jabbing at the toilet contents with a plunger (think Captain Ahab attempting to harpoon his elusive whale), eventually eradicating the beastly clog. 3) I returned to our permanently pickle-scented kitchen, only to hear my under-the-weather son request a ride to urgent care. I drove him there, but not before serving the Cubanos (sans pickles) to our guests on time.
I’m unsure if our company enjoyed their meal, too suspicious perhaps that I hadn’t washed my hands between thwarting the great toilet flood incident and putting the finishing touches on their Cuban sandwiches. Later, though, my wife praised me for my grace exuded during the Cuban Sandwich Crisis moment.
For a cook, I’m a pretty good mop and plunger guy.
If you’re wondering, “Well, Scott, did you? Did you wash your hands?”, I can only reply, “Shut up and eat your s*&$ on a shingle!”
Scott’s latest humor column collection, “Quietly Making Noise,” is available on Amazon. Contact scottsaalman@gmail.com to request him as a guest speaker.