What I don't know about tempura- Entry One

What I don’t know about tempura- introduction

I’ve never used a carbonated liquid to make a batter, ever. It’s obvious to anyone who asks me, and they do ask me as I’m supposed to be a chef. I’m supposed to know how to make everything, but I don’t. High among the list of the things I’m poor at would be batters. My dumplings sometimes are flavorful, sometimes soggy, but I still don’t know how to make a large quantity of them without burning my stew. I know, it’s stupid, I should just cook them in the drained stew liquid, but I don’t. I used to be fine making cakes, but after reading the Cake Bible and other scholarly tomes, after studying so much about the families of cakes and the principals and factors of cakes, now I can’t make cakes, I get tempted to buy a cake mix when someone asks me to make a cake. My crepes are hit and miss, and my cookies are hardly ever chewy. I’ve even lost my touch on a twisting a consistent perogy dough, and I used to be a drunken master of perogy dough. Now my perogies all turn out slimy and barely hold together. I’ve never made pastry as I would always get cheap over the cost of the butter. I’m a fry cook and a loner, I’ve got no one to make pastry for. What’s a lonely single man doing making pastry in his one room apartment? I eat garbage myself and I don’t care. I squatted in the corner of the fine kitchen eating Muskovy duck with cherry demi, I shoveled it without utensils, the chef glanced over, then all the rest of my days there I got pasta. I’m always too cheap to use beer or soda for my tempura batters. I always just use water and drink the beer. So it’s obvious why I fail, why after twenty years of cooking I know absolutely nothing about tempura. What I don’t know about tempura is a frame for expressing the vast domain of things I don’t know about cooking after making a living off it for twenty years.

Martha Stewart was still young when she wrote ‘Entertaining’ and everything was already magical in her kitchen. Copper pans everywhere, earthen crocks, gas stoves, every possible tool and gadget, a farm in the back with a garden planted particular to each coming banquet, a cultish following. Look into their eyes in the pictures, you find no dissent. My jealousy broke through to love and I accepted her fairy tale cooking world. I was like a little girl flipping through a picture book of an enchanted castle, and this was even before she was famous. She was greater than me and had more than I’ll ever see when she was just getting started. She wasn’t just getting started, she was around forty, but she looked like she was thirteen. I’m forty and look like I’ll die soon, Careme died at twenty six, the life in the wood and coal fire ovens. No, of course not, he died in his late forties, the king of chefs and the chef to kings, but it’s somehow romantic to me to imagine him toiling. I picture Careme toiling just as I picture Escoffier sitting on his arse, even as they were titans both. Perhaps it was because Escoffier lived to almost ninety that I imagine he held something back. The great chefs are also great athletes, Martha Stewart in her sixties could still probably spin twice the plates as me. She was the inspiration for this story.

Her book had an entire chapter on tempura and each page was filled with amazingly simple facts I had no idea about. I’ve been frying things since man first faked the moon landing. I’ve been frying food since I lost my baby teeth. I personally fried ten thousand pounds of chicken wings in three months at just one of the many shitholes I’ve suffered in. Easily half of the food I consumed from 1981-1985 was deep fried by me personally. At least one item of every meal of most of my life has been deep fried. My face is permanently scarred with pock-marks and my arms burnt like a penitent from my years living at and living off of the fryer. I’ve spent an entire lackluster career frying the same five items the same way for the same wage (a buck or two above minimum). But in all those years from the Monte Cristo to ‘the Captain’s’ Pakora Burger, no one ever said to me like Martha Stewart did, that you should cut your vegetables to uniform sizes and group them according to cooking time.

so little to say, so much time

-ever since i 'died' the last time in 2003, i promised to stick around no matter what. my long dead baba came to me and let me know: 'the doorway you go through to the other side determines your afterlife. if you go through in chaos and grief, that's where you end up'. so here i've been the last decade. i don't mind anything, i don't want anything. i am alive, but my purpose has long ended. it's nice. it really is. life has never been so 'nice'.

-art strike, not like you'd notice. i used to burn with ideas, and i'd scribble them down on anything. i'd rip posters off posts and scribble my deep thoughts. but that was back when i thought life was somehow 'fair'. that if i had the best ideas they would somehow win. i spent half my life starving myself, suffering, wandering the streets like a madman, because i thought that my ideas were important. now i know that my best ideas can't compete with the worst ideas by someone with money behind them to present them in a flashy fashion. i thought, of course incorrectly, that i could bring a brilliant idea in on a scrap of paper and it would be greater than a terrible idea with a flashy presentation. i know better now. so now i don't starve and punish myself trying to create brilliant ideas. now i realize i'm a slave like my father before me. that my greatest aspiration would still make me a slave. so now i don't try to be clever for anyone but my wife, and sometimes my own amusement. i vaguely miss art, but it had nothing to offer me, so to hell with it.

-i sometimes follow politics but only like people follow sports, i don't believe we can make a difference any more than we could make our team win by buying merch and cheering. if anything, sports are less rigged than politics. sure the big market team has to make the playoffs, but politics is worse than the cfl- heck there's still 8 teams in the cfl. politics is a joke next to that- there's only two teams and it's still rigged.

-we're probably in something like the matrix, but it's impossible to see what. something is living off us. don't you think it's strange we spend so much time asleep? red pill, blue pill, i forget which pill was which, all i know is that the people who come closest to knowing self medicate.

-i ended this blog because no one reads it. i started this blog because i published a book. i thought writing might be better than performance because you wouldn't have to sell yourself as much, just write good work and cash the cheques. i was wrong, you have to sell yourself more because writing is inanimate. bad idea, oh well. it wasn't my first.

The Jazz Bunny.

The Jazz Bunny:
This story is a story of the greatest moment of someone’s life, and I didn’t even have to witness it. I wouldn’t want to witness the greatest moment in the ‘Jazz Bunny’s’ life. But I was there shortly after; I may have been the first to hear it. And here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the ‘Jazz Bunny’ story.
‘Mike, Mike, I just had the greatest experience of my life.’
‘Hi Darren.’
‘Hi Mike, how are you?’
‘I’m fine Darren. How’s about you?’
‘Um, I just had the greatest experience of my life.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘Really, I did.’
Winnipeg is not a very trendy place. Where we were standing at that moment was a place called Osborne Village, in the main circle by River and Osborne. As far as Winnipeg went, I was in a cultural Mecca. The emperor wore no clothes at River and Osborne. There’s nothing about Osborne Village that a tourist driving through would think would be a reason to stop, but for Winnepegers, this circle where the skids sold crack, was our Eiffel tower. I was at the foot of our Eiffel tower in front of a man brandishing a saxophone in a full-length bunny costume. I remained cool, and asked him to explain what was so amazing about his recent experience.
‘I was busking, right at this spot, an hour ago.’
‘Yes.’ Darren was the worst thing that ever happened to a saxophone since it’s invention by Adolf Sax one hundred and fifty years earlier. And that’s saying a lot. That he had created a character for himself; ‘The Jazz Bunny’ made it alright some how. You expected the worst sax of your life from ‘The Jazz Bunny’ and he delivered. This story couldn’t take place anywhere else; not even in Portland Oregon are they so strange, as strange as they are there. We ate and fucked our cousins in Winnipeg too, but our solitude is worse than Stalingrad. Portland is near California and its Californiacation as I’m told. Our solitude is Siberian in Winnipeg.
‘I was playing here just an hour ago, and a beautiful woman came up to me, a business woman, all in black.’ I could barely listen already, I was so envious. As I’d never been with a woman who had ever washed herself without taking it all the way, never mind the levels of cleanliness one would have to build, to be believable in a business suit with all it’s confirmations of status and hygiene. Not every mad woman with two or three hundred dollars can walk out of a store carrying a powersuit on their body. They must have been powersuit before they walked in there. Darren understood, I understand, women know this very well and agree, if with nothing else.
‘She stood and watched, this beautiful business woman, she really liked my act’. There he stood, this thirty year old horrible saxophone player with coke bottle glasses and a full length gray bunny costume, telling me a woman I would never be worthy of looking at had enjoyed his performance.
‘She put a five dollar bill in my case.’ This was back when they still had one and two dollar bills. That she bypassed these other denominations and went as far a five-dollar bill was incredible, I unconsciously touched my pocket to see if I even had a five-dollar bill.
‘And I thought that was it myself, and I would have been happy. I mean I don’t usually get such attention.’ Of course he didn’t get such attention from anyone for anything. Of course he was lucky the cops didn’t lock him up for depraved attention grabbing and aural rape, he was lucky he didn’t get that kind of attention. ‘But she stuck around. And then she wanted to buy me dinner. And I said sure thing.’ I was long gone. Repulsion and envy, he was such an embarrassing figure, and he was far more fortunate than me in that moment.
‘We went to ‘Carlos and Murphy’s’ (an Irish-Mexican pub still in operation) and she bought me a beer and chicken nachos.’
‘Not just regular nachos?’
‘Like I said, the greatest moment of my life. And not just a regular beer, a Carona!’
‘Not just a pint of Canadian?’
‘The greatest moment of my life.’
‘Well congratulations.’
‘Where are you going? There’s more.’
‘There can’t be. I’m stuffed with envy already.’
‘You haven’t heard the best part.’
‘Sure I have. Five dollars, beautiful woman, chicken nachos and a Carona, I got it, congratulations.’
‘She went down on me.’
‘What?’
‘At the table.’
‘In broad daylight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she insane?’
‘Who cares?’ pause.
‘She’s in a powersuit.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re in a bunny costume?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s performing oral sex.’
‘Yes.’
‘While you had chicken nachos and a Carona?’
‘Yes.’
‘That she paid for?’
‘Plus five dollars.’ Pause.
‘A beautiful woman in a powersuit went down on a geek with a saxaphone in a bunny costume in the middle of a busy restaurant in broad daylight while he ate chicken nachos and drank Carona.’
‘Yes!’
‘Go to hell.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘I know you are, that’s why you can go to hell.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s not just the greatest moment of your life, you the Jazz Bunny. That would be the greatest moment of anyone’s life. A millionaire couldn’t have a better greatest moment.’
‘I know.’ And he giggled like a thief.