What's Cooking? Glad You Asked!

I noticed that several of these Web logs, also known as "blogs," provide evidence of the ability of the writer to perform culinary tasks of varying degrees of difficulty. Today I will attempt to do the same.

This is not a closeup of stuff scraped out of arteries from an anti-smoking commercial.

A number of blogs, particularly the fashion blogs I discussed in a previous post, include recipes, but their posts almost always have what I lack:

• A clean kitchen
• Great photography
• Food that's worthy of that photography, which is always coffee-table-cookbook ready

With that being said, one of my interests — "hobbies," if you will — is cooking, especially baking.

Have I whetted your appetite? (See what I did there?) If so, read on!
It amazes me that there are men (and, I suppose, some women) who are clumsy around the kitchen, in that sort of stereotypical-sitcom-dad kind of way. You know, like when BillCosbyTimAllenRayRomano is forced to make dinner because the wife is at some PTA meeting, and the paterfamilias enters his kitchen with the wonder of Cortés when he stumbled into heart of the Aztec empire, and tries to scramble an egg and creates a disaster unseen since Three Mile Island. It's embarrassing to men everywhere.

Mix master.

Then again, I know as much about auto maintenance as Benjamin Franklin did, and consider the highlight of my home-improvement achievements to have drilled a paper towel dispenser under the kitchen cabinets. A leaking washing machine would likely lead me to Noah's ark-worthy disaster that my friend Lawrence endured last week.

My tools, if I want to sound arrogant and perhaps a little gay, are measuring cups and baking pans. When the soon-to-be-Mrs. The Anthony Show and I registered for wedding gifts, I went straight to the housewares section, while the bride-to-be agonized over which towels to select, as if that were the secret to a successful marriage. (Then again, everything's worked out pretty well so far...)

The crown jewel of my kitchen is the KitchenAid stand mixer, and to this day and beyond, Mrs. The Anthony Show has never used it, part of the reason why my mother-in-law calls me the daughter she never had. (At least I hope that's the reason.)

I'M NOT TRYING TO INSULT MY WIFE OR HER COOKING
Mrs. The Anthony Show is actually a good cook herself (I mean, I'm still alive, right? RIGHT?); the culinary arts is not a zero-sum game at Maison de l'Anthony Show. But there are a few, well, disagreements we have when it comes to making meals. Usually, she'll go for the simplest recipe, like simply dipping bread in beaten eggs to make French toast, whereas I'll research the dish like I was shopping for a cardiologist to perform my open-heart surgery.

But is it worth it? If it means taking a few extra steps, including running to Stop & Shop to pick up some missing ingredients in order to execute Alton Brown's custardy baked French toast...

So good that a caption isn't worthy.

...you're damn right it's worth it, even if in the aftermath my kitchen looks like it was pummeled by Hurricane Bisquick.

SAY YOU MADE THEM BECAUSE "I JUST GOT SO SICK OF MAKING BAKED ALASKA EVERY WEEK"
Last night is one of the nights Mrs. The Anthony Show is at class to get a better-paying job because her husband made some bad career choices in his life and I'm going off the rails again but anyway so Son Of The Anthony Show and I decided to make some Rice Krispies Treats. For this recipe we used Cocoa Krispies, because Awesome + Chocolate = Awesomer.

Rice Krispies Treats are ridiculously easy to make. If you can turn on a burner and know the difference between low heat and high heat, you can make a dessert to bring to a party that will probably get you extra bonus points from the host(ess) and guests because (a) it's homemade and (b) no one doesn't like Rice Krispies Treats.

WELL, ACTUALLY...
I'm not much of a fan, myself. But the treat is just sweet enough that you can't really get sick of them, though I'm never like, "Boy, I could sure go for Rice Krispies Treats right now!" And the kids love them, so they're usually a hit, unless you run into the weirdo who doesn't like marshmallows, in which case you should dump a jar of Fluff on his head and say, "Oh, when you said you didn't like marshmallows, I thought you meant that you like having a jar of Fluff dumped on your head." And everyone, even the marshmallow-averse guy with the Fluff in his hair, will laugh, I guarantee it. (NOTE: I do not guarantee that.)

Here are some photos of how easy these things are to make:

Do you know how to melt butter? No? Are you able to find your way home from work? How is it that you're even able to read? Three tablespoons of butter. Melt them in a pot, on low heat. If you have a normal supply of pots, go for your second-largest pot, which is probably three or four quarts.

Start to add your marshmallows. Use a 10-ounce bag. It's easier to use mini because they'll melt quicker. I'm using the larger ones because I don't didn't do the food shopping this week. (ZING!)

They look sort of cute, all crammed in here like when I used to commute via the New York City subway system. Almost a shame they'll end up melting into a solid mass like the souls of the damned in a Hellraiser movie.

I've done a lot of stupid things, including burning my hand while cooking, but at least I've been able to fight the temptation to push my hand into this attractive white molten pool of sticky hot goo. Don't you want to know what it would feel like? MUST...STICK...HAND...IN

Add six cups of Rice Krispies and stir it up. You can also use Lucky Charms or a similarly sweet cereal, or plain Cheerios if you hate your guests, and you can try flavored marshmallows if you want to show off.

Soon it'll begin to look like this.

Scrape this ugly mass into a prepared baking dish. You want the dish greased, preferably with cooking spray, so you can actually get the treats out of the dish when you're ready. Smashing the whole tray on the floor and hoping the guests will be able to remove the shards themselves qualifies as overoptimism.

Now, if you're alone and miserable and have no shame or self-respect, you can just leave that mass as is and chip away at it to satisfy your gluttony. But most humans prefer their treats into uniform squares, so you want to spread the ricey goo into the dish. If you want to minimize the sticky factor, use a sheet of wax paper as a buffer. Your hands will be clean (and your guests relieved that you don't have your palm prints all over their dessert), but there's a slight side effect:

When you peel off the wax paper, if you're impatient like I am and won't wait for the dessert to cool off, you'll get some of it stuck to the paper. There is an upside to this: you can peel off and eat what's on the wax paper and the dish looks as if it were untouched, and you can convince yourself you haven't had any dessert yet.

Then (you should wait until they cool a bit) cut them into your desired shape. Squares, rectangles, and near-parallelograms are easiest, but go crazy with circles and phallic symbols if that's the kind of party you're attending.

Make sure you soak and clean the pot you were using, like, immediately.

AND IN CONCLUSION
I suppose I'll be publishing more cooking/baking posts in the future. Maybe I'll try a unique-ish gimmick, where I post videos of me assuming I've removed all evidence of my culinary alchemy, only to have the wife come home and immediately say, "I see you've tried making those snickerdoodles again. Did you have to share them with the entire kitchen?"