Ina Garten, Paula Deen, and Me

Ina Garten – Ina is the host of my current favorite cooking show, the Barefoot Contessa.  Aside from cooking all sorts

of wonderful and traditional French culinary delights, she also has an ability to zombify any who stumble upon her show while channel surfing.  How she does this is beyond me, but there is something both uniquely disturbing and calming about someone talking about a potato gratin in a monotone while having people decorate her house in the Hamptons with piles of fresh flowers for her parties and other get-togethers.  I wonder if she took lessons in calming speech therapy before she started the show.  I bet if she was played in hospitals, people would feel totally comforted and recovery rates would sky rocket.

Paula Deen – A close second to Ina in entertainment, her somewhat sloppy cooking style makes you feel better when you decide to feed the accidents to your dogs (or occasionally cats, in my case).  Also, (I'm not sure how these TV chefs have these weird superpowers) she manages to remind pretty much everyone of their grandmother, even if their grandmother does not have to remotest trace of a southern accent.  She also does strange things, that most people would never dream of doing, like deep fry macaroni with bacon wrapped around it.  I kid you not.

Me – Most of you know me (one would assume so), and know that I occasionally take it upon myself to cook things, for better or for worse.  Well, today I discovered that the two can come dangerously close to each other.  After watching Ina cook zucchini vichyssoise for some random people, I decided that I felt like having some ordinary vichyssoise for lunch.  A lot.  A whole lot.  No matter that I had never previously made vichyssoise, didn't know what it took to make it, and didn't even know if I had ever eaten it before, I set out to make some for lunch.  The first thing I discovered was that we had no leeks (one of the two main and almost only ingredients needed), so I cut up and onion and threw it in the soup pot.  The soup pot I had heated way too much, and I wasn't aware until today what burned onion looked like.  Well, it turns brownish blackish and gets kind of hard.  After picking the burned onion out, I then decided it would be a good time to find out if we had any potatoes (I am NOT the type of person who plans ahead when cooking).  Luckily we did, and pretty much everything went smoothly from then on, until it came time to puree the mix (which now was just cooked potatoes and onions, and veggie broth).  I grabbed the handy food mill and started mashing away.  Until I happened to lift the mill of the bowl to check my progress and discovered a starting thing.  Some poor, sad person had oiled the mill with some sort of ugly black oil that was now dripping all over the freshly processed vichyssoise.  And when I say black, I mean it.  If this stuff had been coming out of my car, I would have been worried.  As it was, I was REALLY worried as it dripped menacingly onto the processed carrots and potatoes.  I'm almost positive this was not any kind of food-grade oil, and was most likely WD-40.  I considered the options, which were really only to stop and throw the soup away, or to keep going.  I kept going.  I scooped out any obvious bits of machine oil, and poked around to see it I could find any more.  I didn't, so I just stirred everything together, and washed off the food mill, hoping that washing it wouldn't cause more of this vile oil to escape from wherever it was hiding to drip onto the rest of the food.  It didn't.  Amazingly enough, after the base was mixed with some milk and cream, it turned out very good.  I couldn't taste any oil in it at all.  I'm also betting on the fact that it would take an awful lot of WD-40 to actually harm you, and probably eating potatoes and cream will neutralize it anyway.  As I sat down to eat my wonderful concoction, Paula Deen happened to pop onto the television screen.  And then she decided to share her recipe with me for deep fried mac and cheese with bacon.  And that cured my WD-40 related fears once and for all.  If Paula can make the people at Food Network to approve a recipe for deep fried pasta and cheese and bacon, which will probably kill you if you actually eat it, then I've got no worries eating a little bit of mysterious black oil mixed in my vichyssoise.