Bletch

(Written Saturday night)

Wow. I just made a stupendously horrid dinner. What’s surprising about this experience is that 1. it was a dish I’d cooked numerous times before, 2. I’m usually good at resurrecting dead flavors, and 3 .even after I created something obviously rancid, I still decided to eat it.

My supply of food had dwindled down to a few random ingredients and based on what was available, I thought I put together a nice Thai curry. Usually, I start with a roux—butter, flour and coconut milk—and then add in the onions, garlic, peanut butter, and spices. Boil some potatoes, pasta, or rice and top with thinly sliced red peppers and fresh basil and ta-dah, dinner is served.

Looking back, there were a couple causes for my failure. I hadn’t washed the pan since lunch and maybe the crusty leftover grease from my hamburger somehow prevented even heating of the elements. Most likely, it was the fact that I used plain yogurt instead of coconut milk. It’s all dairy, I thought, and I’ve used plain milk before so what’s the difference?

The difference is that the yogurt, as I now know, curdles. I could tell, just by looking at it, that the consistency was way off, veering towards cottage cheese, and therefore, the taste had probably gone off the deep end as well.

When I tested the sauce midway through, I got confused; had I accidentally thrown up in my mouth and didn’t realize it? How could I have created something that was the exact same texture, temperature, and flavor as vomit?

I should have stopped there, but no, I thought I could fix it. My first attempt was to add salt; maybe the yogurt was masking the true flavor of the curry and other spices and I just needed the salt to enhance what was already there. I tasted it again and thought it was headed in the right direction. Or maybe my taste buds were in shock and no longer functioning correctly.

I continued on and once the potatoes were done boiling, I poured the sauce over and let it sit awhile, letting the flavors soak in. I tried it again and to my frustration, I still couldn’t discern anything enjoyable. The next logical step, in my mind, was to find something to counteract that nasty-back-of-the-throat acidic aftertaste. Sugar! Just a couple pinches should do the trick. And while the barf effect dwindled to a mild and tolerable level, the sauce still lacked any body or substance.

At last resort, I doused everything with by stand-by stir fry sauce, House of Tsang’s Szechwan Spicy Sauce. It was now a weird cultural mix of Chinese and Thai and still really quite bad.

But I ate it because I had made it and being the young bachelor that I am, I couldn’t just throw away food. And I’m of course using the term “food” quite loosely.

After finishing up dinner, enjoying the sunset and not thinking about what I was consuming, I returned to the kitchen to put away the leftovers. But it was an internal debate; on one hand, I could have lunch already made for tomorrow but on the other hand, did I really want to submit my body through that experience again?

In the end, the kitchen gods decided my fate. Unintentionally, I had left the burner on under the pot and during the course of my meal, it had scorched the remaining portion into something even more inedible. I’ll take that as a sign.