FUCK YOUR GODDAMN SHITTY-ASS RECIPE!, Vol. I

Welcome, gentle readers, to the first installment of our Interwebs serial, Fuck Your Goddamn Shitty-Ass Recipe! 


Before we begin, I'd like to say a few words about the genesis of this column. Fuck Your Goddamn Shitty-Ass Recipe! came about because of the Internets in general, and the Intersite called "Pinterest". Please take a moment to click this Interlink if you are somehow unaware of the Pinterest.

DUDE, IT'S ONLY LIKE THE COOLEST THING CURRENTLY ON THE INTERNETS NOT INVOLVING CAT PICTURES. Wait, it has piles of cat pictures. But you see, that's the genius of the thing. You can post every single got-damn Maru video you own. You can pin Lolcats until your eyes bleed from the unutterable cuteness. You might consider doing a few non-cat-related boards, just to keep people interested, but you don't have to if you don't want to. I pin whatever the fuck I feel like!

And so does everyone else. It's digital democracy for the visual thinker. You literally throw shit up against the wall and see what sticks, and categorize said shit to make it easier for others to locate. I could go on for hours about what the hell it all means, but you get the idea. It's like Imgur with organization.

The thing is, digital democracy has its price. For every cool thing I see on Pinterest, I see hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of things that are lame, passe, pointless, tasteless, or all of the above. For every picture of Foster the People, there are three dozen Anne Geddes photographs. You know, that bitch:

"OOOOOH! Isn't that cute? How does she come up with this stuff!?"

Oh, shut the fuck up. I almost used Thomas Kinkade as my example, and if I had done that you'd be looking at one of his so-called "masterpieces" right now. Plus there would be vomit on your keyboard.

Most people don't have any particular artistic taste to speak of, or if they do, it's bad. This is not aesthetic theory, or elitism, or even a lament. It's just the truth. And while I despise the Geddes, the Kinkade, that other hack Kim Anderson, etc, the good thing about pins of their, er, "work" is that I can instantly avoid them. I see Kim-fucking-Anderson, I ain't clickin' that shit. I see some stupid office-humor truism that was tired out before the first Bush administration superimposed on a stock photo of a farm, I'm not wasting my time looking at it. I will, of course, mock it in my own time, but it doesn't drive me crazy.  

I could let it all pass by me if it wasn't for the fucking food pins.

Everyone eats. And in America, at this stage of our development, we have more cooking and dining options than all of the other cultures of the world, throughout history, combined. In general I'm extremely pleased with the culinary Renaissance this country has undergone in just the last few decades. We drink more wine than beer; we know that "Chinese food" is a meaningless grab-bag term; we can buy good brands of pink peppercorns, French grey sea salt, and handmade Italian pastas at fucking TJ Maxx. Nobody gave a wet shit about Argentinian steakhouses twenty years ago. Now we've got 'em in Nashville. Right here in Bowling Green you can buy all of the ingredients for an authentic Thai green curry for less than $15 at the Asian market. Hell, you can buy all of the ingredients at Kroger, too, for something more like $20.

That is, if you're the sort of person who actually likes to eat good food. Everybody else is still doing this shit.

The worst offenders are the people who somehow have both appalling taste in food, yet enough aesthetic sense to make the pictures they take of their Ritz-Cracker Rat Bake look appetizing. Hiding under the nom de guerre of "Autumn Casserole", resplendent in a white ceramic dish with fluted sides, it entices me, and I click on the pin, follow it to its original home (normally someone's FUCKING AWFUL blog), and there I find that I have been deceived. 


Then there are the people who have appalling taste in food, and don't care. (Their blogs are awful, too, but slightly more honest.) I can understand that we aren't all alike, and that not everyone has the benefit of growing up in a family full of cooks as I did. Some will never develop good cooking skills, or don't care to devote the time. I get all that. It doesn't make up for the fact that these people eat GARBAGE, and are determined to help other people eat garbage.

I repeat, however: this is digital democracy. You have the right to like shitty food. You have the right to advertise to the world via Pinterest that you like shitty food. You even have the right to explain to me in the description of your pin that I will also like this shitty food, usually because making it is "easy".

I, however, have the right to remark that another thing that's "easy" is your mom. 

And she'd probably taste better than most of that glued-together MESS that you're ladling out of your Crock-Pot.

The Crock-Pot is going to feature very heavily in Fuck Your Goddamn Shitty-Ass Recipe!. It has the distinction of being one of the most misused kitchen appliances in history. Yes, I own one. Yes, I have used it, many times. It's excellent for making soups, stews, bean dishes, and other things that require long, slow, even-temperatured cooking-- because it's a fucking slow cooker. 

It is NOT a magical goddamn ROBOT-WIZARD HYBRID OF THE CULINARY ARTS that can do any kitchen task you assign to it. Sure, with enormous amounts of tweaking, you can get it to produce weird facsimile versions of all kinds of dishes. Such as the following entry, today's Star Prize winner: 

                                                                             Muffins!  

No, you didn't hallucinate that.

 Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as long as you have muffin mix, oil, eggs, a muffin tin and some of those DARLING little fluted paper cups, you may in fact craft delicious muffins in your very own electrical or gas oven. All told you'll spend no more than five minutes on prep and about twenty on baking. Brain-dead people with hooks for hands can do this. 

But why do it the old-fashioned way when you can enjoy the benefits of TECHNOLOGY? Thanks to the tireless research conducted by the Society of Crock-Pot Fetishists, you can use the wonders of modern science to create delicious muffins--in JARS! (You'll have to use jars, actually, because even the tinfoil muffin tins won't fit in the Crock-Pot unless you cut them into bits.) But wait--the Crock-Pot is so revolutionary, so INNOVATIVE, that the Muffin of Tomorrow is actually EIGHT TIMES LESS EFFICIENT than its oven-baked predecessor! Now those pesky muffins will stay put--in the CROCK-POT--while you use your newfound free time to SPREAD THE GOSPEL OF THE CROCK-POT across all the Internets! 

Seriously, something is really, really wrong with the logic involved in devising a way to make instant food in a slow cooker, rather than just doing it as indicated on the package. For that matter, you could make muffins from scratch in way less than two and a half hours. Which is why, today, we say to you, Crock Pot Muffins: 

Fuck your goddamn shitty-ass recipe! 

Top Ten Children's Books NOT Recommended by the ALA

Sorry this blog fizzled out after a couple of entries. It's been a crazy year.

With that said, I've been going through some Sterilite containers that I've never touched since we moved almost two years ago. I found a bunch of my old journals (oh, the humanity...) and I'm pleased to say that, sorted out of the self-pitying crap and discarded story ideas, I did find something that made me laugh: an old list of made-up children's book titles that once graced the whiteboard in the bathroom at my very first job.

Years ago, I worked in our local mall bookstore, B. Dalton. This was, at the time, a division of the Barnes and Noble Corporation. Let me rephrase that; we were the RED-HEADED STEPCHILD of B&N. The red-headed stepchild that lived under the porch and was told not to come out during the day, lest it be seen by the neighbors.

It was my first retail job, and it was a VERY good introduction to the Horrible World of Retail. I have literally hundreds of stories from those four amusing and terrifying years, which I will relate from time to time in the future. But for now, you should know that the employees were a pretty interesting crew, and I still have close contact with at least three of my former co-workers (Mary Jo, Lucile, and Nathan...excuse me, Dr. Stice.) Like most intelligent people working in a job that offered limited pay and benefits, and which required enormous amounts of both mental and physical labor plus the ability to deal with a customer base that almost defies description, we developed into some of the most cynical smart-asses you've ever seen in your life.

Working in the book trade quickly disabuses you of the notion that the reading public are a bunch of nerdy bookworms. In fact, the opposite is usually true. While millions of Americans don't read, the ones that do tend to read utter, steaming, vile, ill-written CRAP. I would estimate that over 50% of all people who read for pleasure NEVER read anything more intellectually challenging than a Harlequin romance. It's goddamn frustrating when you're a book lover, to stand in a space filled with fantastic books from all over the world, books like 1984 and Dune and Sense and Sensibility and The Great Gatsby, and to realize that those books are the ones that sit on the shelves, gathering dust until the day they're sent back to the publisher for credit or, worse, their covers are stripped off and the remaining disfigured book is THROWN IN THE TRASH.  Meanwhile, the True Crime, "Self-Help", and Bodice-Ripper sections empty out every month, carried off by slavering twats who pat themselves on the back for being "readers" and think themselves mighty fine.

Even among those who read good things, there's an enormous reliance on the opinons of others when choosing what to read, or what to buy as a gift. We happened to be working in books at the very, very beginning of that cultural phenomenon of the '90s that must be written in capital letters to give a sense of its importance: OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB. By and large, we approved of it. It got people reading, there were some very good books on the list, and it definitely sent sales way, way up. But so many of the people who participated in it didn't want to read anything that Her Winfreyness hadn't recommended. We'd suggest things similar to the items the customers had purchased in the past (for example, if someone had read and enjoyed Song of Solomon, I'd invariably pitch The Color Purple. And was rewarded, every time, with blank stares and occasional outright hostility. After all, what did I know. Was I OPRAH? Obviously NOT.)

Another source of information that people relied heavily on was the American Library Association's list of Notable Children's Books. Now, don't get me wrong, this is an invaluable resource and the titles are usually fantastic. But again, people who based the purchases on the list tended to be AMAZINGLY resistant to suggestions of other, equally good children's books. Whether it was our frustration at this behavior, our general stress, or just pure cussedness, one late Saturday night, when we were packing returns long after the mall had closed, we came up with our OWN list of children's books...a list that would never make the Notable category, no matter how well they sold. This was directly inspired by a David Letterman Top Ten list from the early '90s (I'll dig it up and post it as a comment later) but on the whole, I think ours were better.

Here you go. Enjoy...I think. And yes, you will note that there are 13 titles, not ten. So sue me. We were tired and getting giggly, and couldn't be stopped.

TOP TEN CHILDREN'S BOOKS NOT RECOMMENDED BY THE ALA:

13. Tell Us About Sex, Amelia Bedelia! 
12. Frog and Toad Are Domestic Partners
11. The Little Engine That Couldn't
10. Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame Scratch and Sniff
9. Clifford Gets Fixed 
8. Goosebumps #3528: "It Came From the Colostomy Bag" 
7. Everyone Poops (the Pop-Up Edition) 
6. Quacker Meets Mr Decoy and Mr Hunter
5. The Klutz Kid's Book of Knives
4. Baby's First Satanic Bible 
3. The Magic School Bus in a Full-Scale Nuclear Exchange
2. The Berenstain Bears Learn About Incest
1. Curious George and the Big Bag of Crack