A Coronary Delight
Food Porn, The Elders Comments (15)
Nearly every admirable trait that I developed growing up was acquired by watching and listening to my grandparents. Theirs is a pretty extraordinary story and one that I’ll no doubt provide snippets of here from time to time. My grandmother likes to tell me how, when I was just a wee lad sitting in my high chair whipping handfulls of strained pears across the kitchen, the one thing that would stop me in mid-whip was the sound of her preparing bread dough for its ultimate ovenly destination. The sound involved her slapping the bejeezus out of the dough in order to rid it of air bubbles created by the yeast. This would apparently send me into uncontrollable fits of giggling, which only encouraged her. I tell her now that it was a nervous giggle, because I was thinking at the time, ‘Better that dough than my butt’, because she brooked no misbehavior or outright rebellion under her roof. At all. Ever. Seriously, no one messed with grandma. Even now, at 87…No one. Messes. With grandma.
This little event marked the initiation of something very important. It evolved from high-chair viewing, to sitting on a stool next to her at the kitchen counter, to standing next to her at the counter, to later and even now, towering over her while standing next to her at the counter, always watching. And learning. Through these impromptu lessons and subsequent years of trial and error, I’ve managed to go from ‘pretty capable cook’ to the kind of person that sets fire to sauces while yelling ‘Opa!’ and knows what a reduction is and which wines work better than others. I also ended up a marginally capable baker of things that make a person both fat and happy (pies, cakes, etc.). And this, you see, is awesome.
Maybe the greatest aspect of these lessons was that of improvisation. Recipes are a nice start, but not necessarily to be stringently followed. It’s the natural course of things to find ways of making them better over time. You just have to understand the effect of over- or under-doing certain ingredients. Cooking, therefore, becomes both science and art in many ways. Once you manage to get a dish or a confection exactly the way you like it, there’s nothing quite like eating well to make everything else in your world a little better. If someone asked me to rank my greatest accomplishments in life, finally getting my pie crust on par with my grandmother’s would easily be in the top 5. That was a banner day, indeed.
Now whenever I get a hankerin’ for anything food related, the craving is easily satisfied. Thanks, grandma. And this week, the hankerin’ took the form of cheesecake, but not just any cheesecake. See, it started as just any cheesecake, then morphed into something beautiful; a dessert so rich, so amazing in its artery-strangling perfection, that to simply gaze upon it invites madness. So, gird your loins for insanity!: Chocolate/Espresso cheesecake WIIIIIIIITH….a shot of Jameson’s for my homies.
‘How?!?!?!?’, you ask?
Practice, practice, practice. The great thing about this recipe is that even when it doesn’t turn out exactly the way you’d like, it’ll probably still be highly edible. Cheesecake involving chocolate (like most things involving chocolate) rarely sucks, regardless of what it looks like or what else might’ve gone wrong. With this recipe, I have given you the key; now you must go forth and do … oh, whatever, just go make the friekin’ cheesecake.
Sir @ July 9, 2008
::low whistle::
Cooking is one of my greatest pleasures. To have someone come over and tell me that they loved my meal is something that makes me happy. I agree with you when you say not to follow the recipe, to just use it as a guideline. Nothing is better than good food and good friends.
i cook everything in the microwave.
true story.
Heather Anne: Boiling water? A distant train?
Melissa: I cook for others a couple times a week. They’re the perfect guinea pigs, really, in that they have good taste and they’re not shy in their critiques, i.e. ‘It’s awesome’ or ‘My God, that sucks, seriously, take it away, we thought you liked us’. Honesty is always appreciated.
Kat: Stop being such a lying liar of lies.
Wait. Did you just say, “And the next time I visit my grandma, I’m going to pack one of these awesome cheesecakes into a cooler and surrender it to the lovely Pudding family.”? Because I think you just said that, Sir. In fact, I know you did.
(Those lucky homies.)
can’t help it. that jennie’s a bad influence.
Food porn is the best category. This post made me want to go cook something, but then I realized I have no money.
My wife and I made chocolate cheesecakes for our own wedding a hundred and sixteen years ago. We could have used your expertise. We were strict recipe followers.
Angela: But you have an entire cheesecake factory! In a mall! Isn’t that, like, part of the American Dream or something?!? Still, I suppose I could work something out.
Kat: Well, yes. Jennie is The Devil.
Ashley: I figured adding the word ‘porn’ to the site would, if nothing else, make the statistics more entertaining from a ‘search results’ point of view. Maybe if you created a big ‘ol banner reading ‘CLICK HERE FOR PORN!’ and somehow managed to attach it to some Google Ad stuff you might be able to make a little food money. Maybe. I dunno. Just typing out loud here.
Peefer: Well, you’re still married, so it couldn’t have turned out that bad.
Jameson’s, cheese, chocolate, AND coffee? These are a few of my favorite things! There’s no man nor woman anywhere who could resist the combination of charming, articulate, & funny + Jameson’s, cheese, chocolate AND coffee. Thus, I ask you, where are the bodies buried? Because by my calculations, the only way you could be single is if you’ve killed all the applicants for spouse.
I declare, that sounds like an orgasm in a springform pan.
Shari: Well, define ‘killed’. And ‘buried’. My HR Department is pretty harsh where qualifications are concerned. Probably too much so. I should really have a stern talk with them.
Jamelah: Ew. Well, on second thought…..no, I had it right. Ew.
Well, you know. Taking things too far is what I do.
If I ever lose what little dignity I have left, I’ll make sure to keep that in mind.
Geez, I leave the Internets for a few days and suddenly I’m THE DEVIL? WTF?
Hee.