AlyssaV

I am one of those people who really enjoys food, working with it, experimenting, trying new flavours and ingredients, and attempting to do that crazy reallyfastdicing technique with really sharp knives that you see on all the cooking shows.  I like to cook, but I am only average at it.  I’m the kind of person who burns stuff a lot, or over-seasons a dish, or adds too much oil, or mistakes cayenne pepper for paprika.  As well, I don’t have the technical training to attempt a lot of the fancier dishes, so the extent of my culinary adventuring lately has been experimenting with stir fry.  And anyone can make stir fry. 

I also like to watch the Food Network.  I love the PEI Giant, who has a real name that I can’t remember, and spends half of each episode wandering around in Charlottetown’s Zehrs.  I love Nigella, because she’s sexy and voluptuous and luxuriant and so are all her recipes.  I love Jamie Oliver because he has a garden, and his harvests form the basis of his meals.  I even love Gordon Ramsay.  But most of all, I love Iron Chef America.   

Context: Today my mom gave me 18 quail eggs.  Someone had traded them for an old, decrepit organ that has been sitting in my grandmother’s basement for three decades.  The quail eggs were a delicious surprise, since the organ had been promised to this man for free.  But my mom doesn’t know what to do with them and I guess my relatives aren’t interested.  I, of course, as a wanna-be foodie, immediately took possession.

The problem is that all the online recipes I’ve found so far call for ridiculous ingredients like black truffles or caviar.  For fuck’s sake!  It makes me want to just drain the eggshells and use them for some kind of magical art, like a mosaic made of shells.  On one hand I feel like I have been given a magical gift.  I feel like my inner Jamie Oliver is saying, “Quail eggs are delish, eh, just add a little splash of olive oil…”but my inner Alyssa knows that it will probably end in another kitchen fire, like the last time I tried to make popcorn on the stove.

The only thing I could think of was to email a friend who constantly brags about his cooking expertise.  Since all I ever see him eating is manly sandwiches and/or yogurt cups, I can’t really judge for myself.  So I challenged him to an Iron Chef-style duel.  Normally this would be a recipe for disaster, since most people would probably win against me by 36371905625198 points and also probably not set any fires.  But I am hoping he will just email me some recipes, pretending he has actually cooked them at some point in his life, and hoping I won’t call him on it.  In the meantime, I can pretend I cooked some too, but actually I will just steal his recipe and use it to make something less expensive than Quail Eggs Benedict and Caviar.