How to Bastardize Ratatouille. Bum-Bum Germs Stylee.

How to Cook Rattatoooeypie.

First, find an online ratatouille recipe that looks good. I found this here one. 2,000,000 reviews can't be wrong. Or 521. Bygones.

Shit, I messed up already. FIRST, be sure to watch Walt Disney's Ratatouille. So as 2 get in the mood. Find a chef's cap and a small disgusting rodent to place therein. THEN, find a good ratatouille recipe online. Like I says, I found this one.

Step one: Print it out. Step two: Tape it near your cooking area. Step three: Make sure not to follow any of it.

Then, coat a lovely glass pan with a fine fine garlic olive oil. Next, you wash all the vegetables. I said wash all the vegetables. WITH DISH SOAP.

Lather up that eggplant. Lather up those zucchinis. Yes, lather up that onion, even though you are going to take its skin off. You do not want to slice bum-bum germs straight into the sweet, firm white succulent sexy young flesh of an onion.

If you want to make sure you are on good terms with me, you will even wash the garlic. Then you peel that shit, mince that shit, and toss it in a pan of garlic olive oil. Then add in your clean, clean, fresh clean white onion. Sauté for a goodly bit. Then toss in some salt, pepper, parsley flakes, and oregano to taste. Sauté a bit more until that nonsense is translucent and delightfully rank.

Then, take your freshly scrubbed eggplant and peel. Cut, de-seed, scrape that shit out, do whatever you want to prepare your eggplant. Chop it into cubes, slices, trapezoids, I don't give a fuck. Toss with a bit more garlic olive oil.

Take your green pepper, yellow squash, and zucchini. If they have not been scrubbed to almost their very demise, throw everything away and start the fuck over: you obviously cannot follow directions. Begin again by WASHING THAT SHIT WITH SOAP. When you have reached this point again, with clean NON-  E.-coli vegetables this time, slice the green pepper, yellow squash, and zucchini into...slices. Mandolin stylee. All up in here.

If you happen to drop any stray vegetables on the floor, or God forbid the nasty nasty sink, DO NOT USE THAT PIECE REPEAT DO NOT USE THAT PIECE. This one went straight in the garbage:

DO NOT LET FILTHY VEG HAPPEN TO YOU.

Speaking of mushrooms....Now. Now comes the mushrooms. If you're like me, you'll go buy mushrooms, and then throw them promptly away, because mushrooms do not belong in food dishes. Ever. Except when you're feeling saucy. And today, I was feeling saucy. So you can either take your mushroom and do like Tenacious D and shove two of them up your ass, or throw them down the incinerator, or never buy them to begin with....or you can be bold and decide, "Mushrooms? Well why the fuck not. Even though they're groce."

But now comes the dilemma. Do you wash them, or not?

Now, if you google this issue, you'll get wildly varying opinions. Some swear you should never, ever, EVER wash fresh mushrooms, as it removes their delicious (???) flavor. Some say you should take a small firm brush and merely dust off the dirt, even if served raw.

Others say to perhaps take a cursory swipe of the shrooms with a damp cloth, and discard any gnarly stems. Other people? Other people in their right mind? Como yo? remind you that mushrooms are grown right in the motherfucking manure, yo. WASH THAT FUCKING SHIT WITH WATER. WASH IT. WASH IT.

So after you have washed your mushrooms to within an inch of their filthy lives, and possibly even swirled them about in soapy water, slice them. Do it.

Then glance at your recipe again, realize you've forgotten to sauté your eggplant first, scream "SCREW IT!" take a swig of any nearby wine, and go ahead and layer all your veggies. Extremely haphazardly. We're talking, ugly style. Throw that crap all about. No rhyme, no reason.

Stick a few chunks of eggplant here, three slices of green pepper there, and a handful of mushroom all in betwixt. Make sure it is as ugly as poss.

Then, drizzle about 400 calories of olive oil on top, add enough salt and pepper to raise your blood pressure to 160/100, and top with fairly thickly-sliced tomato. Which you surely have washed with dish soap. For to wash off all the hand germs, semen, fecal matter, dust, duck shit, salmonella, and sneeze.

Another "GOTCHA" to one of my favorite people, the Not So Special Mother Janice. :)

Once you have added those divine slices of tomato, add even more S&P. Because you only live once.

Then, top with your onion/garlic sauté mixture. ADD MORE S&P GODDAMMIT. I'm telling you.

Them top with great vast handfuls of shredded parmesan cheese.

(Make sure you have Clorox wipes directly visible in the background at all times.)

Finally, give another cursory glance at your recipe; realize you have done things completely fucking wrong, possibly due to the large amounts of Shiraz you've drunk; say a prayer to the Patron Saint of Pixar movies; and throw that motherfucker in the oven at 350 for 45 minutes. Result:

Tasty, toasty, melty, ugly, random, delicious, cheesy vegetable goodness.

For that Extra Wow Factor, add birthday candles.

Just kidding, don't.

I hope you enjoy your Ratatouille a la Bum-Bum Germs. Mine was spectacular.

Love,
Jo

[You Don't Wanna] Cook With JoJo!

It's time for a cooking lesson, child. I call this one "Cookin' Wit Me, Oh Cee Dee Stylee!" I like to keep it hip, keep it real, for the fresh crowd.

• When cooking ground beef, most people just use the same spoon or spatula the whole way through. They plop in the raw meat, let it cook a bit, give it a stir, (probably) set the spoon down on the counter *dry heaves*, then occasionally give the meat a few more stirs until it is cooked-ish. But by doing this, you are jamming the same spoon containing the original raw ground beef germs right into the now-finished product. What you need to do instead is to switch utensils, at least once throughout. I like to wait until the ground beef is almost totally browned, then I switch to a clean spatula and give it a nice finishing simmer, letting the heat seek and destroy, stirring several more times.

• The same is true with chicken. If you're grilling some up on the BBQ or in a pan, after one side of the chicken has been browned and you take your tongs to flip the bitch over, one side of the tongs has touched totally raw chicken. So you will keep using these tongs to keep flipping the chicken, and then you will remove the chicken from the pan or BBQ with SAME SAME TONGS. Do you Smell the Salmonella What the Rock is Cooking?? Or maybe you use a fork to turn your chicken. The fork stabs into the raw chickie, spreading the same raw juices throughout, every time you turn it. Or maybe you are baking some marinated chicken in the oven, occasionally spooning the marinade over the chicken as it bakes. The marinade was originally chock-full of delicious raw chicken bugs. So please, for the love of hygienia(TM), switch utensils! Change your spatula 3/4 of the way (maybe 9/10 of the way) through cooking ground beef. Switch tongs after both sides of the chicken have been seared. Let the chicken bake thoroughly after you've given it one last covering of marinade (using a new spoon). etc.

• And believe it or not, you should also do the same with eggs! As I scramble them, when they are almost done and need one last flip, I use a new spatula. I scoop them up from underneath, the side that is hot and fully-cooked, and I give 'em a flip, so that you can cook the germs off the top as well.

Sounds simply, and reasonable, donn'it? Although, somehow, for me, it never end up being quite so simple. I manage to go through about 27 utensils and 14 plates and 4 forks and 6 knives (such as when I cut the chicken to see if it's cooked through). My dishwasher usually won't accommodate the amount of cookery I've cookered with for that one simple meat dish.

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Now that's food cookin' OCD stylee (well, I actually think that's not just an OCD thing, it's just good practice. I have a hard time eating burgers at other people's houses, because I'm like, "Now son I know you ain't switched your flipper 'fore you flipped that there burger one last time!"). 

Anyway. As for food handlin', ye gods that's an arduous process for someone like me. I used to be able to barehand the meat with a little TLC (twss) and then just wash thoroughly afterward (usually at least twice, because meat fats tend to make the soap not foam very well on my hands, and I feel like I'm just smearing around e.coli wax). 

Now, I've regressed progressed to using rubber gloves. Those silver nitrile exam ones you get at Costco by the trillions. Especially when handling chicken, because I always trim the fat off. There's nothing worse than crunchy, rubbery chicken fat in a deliciously cooked meal. So I don my gloves, pull out a plastic cutting board, and take out my meat scissors. Then I open the package of chicken, carefully, so carefully, not letting it drip anywhere, and throwing the packaging carefully, so carefully, into the garbage.

I season or slice or chop the chicken, then place it carefully in my cooking dish of choice (grilling pan, glass oven pan, etc.). Then with one gloved hand, I grab the mid-wrist area of the other gloved hand, and peel off that glove. Then I use the now-turned-inside-out glove to remove the other glove, and I carefully, so carefully, throw them away.  Then I wash my hands.

I place the dish in to bake or whatnot or whathaveyou or saywhatnow, and then I fuckin wash my hands again. Because come on.

Then the entire kitchen area is Clorox-wiped.

Now, God forbid I have to marinate, or STORE, some chicken. I employ the same process as above as far as the rubber gloves go, and trim/season, slice it, but when it comes time to put the chicken into a ziplock bag to either marinate or freeze for later use, I scream out, "Husband! O dear husband! Need you!"

He comes along, and holds open the ziplock bag as wide as it will go, which is never quite wide enough, and I carefully, so carefully, place the chicken into the bag. Then I remove my gloves as detailed above, zip the bag closed, and then DOUBLE-BAG the fucker (twss), only to wash my hands yet again. Maybe twice, maybe thrice. And he washes too.

It's all very stressful. 

But got-damn am I a fine cook, and you should try my Aztec Chicken Casserole, or maybe my Taco Chicken with Jack Cheese & Salsa.

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FYI, I've been reading The Help, just like the rest of America. And I laughed my proverbial bum-bum off when I read this passage, where Minny was working with Celia, trying to teach her some good  goddamn sense:

Minny, the hired help: "We lay the battered raw chicken on the rail. Then I have to remind the ding-dong for the bobillionth time to wash her hands before she kills us both."

*snort*