Kitchen kibitzer, or the rejection of the stomach

By Mike Tupa
Bartlesville Area Sports Report

When I was 16 my mom suggested I pursue sportswriting as a career.

Her counsel didn’t reflect on my creative ability, such as it was (or wasn’t).

She just wanted to make sure I stayed out of the kitchen and didn’t end someday in prison for felony cooking.

I would have been to restaurant cuisine to what Hulk Hogan would have been to ballet or to what Barney Fife would have been to playing noseguard.

I’m certain that nearly 50 years later my former missionary roommates during my many months in Italy proselyting for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still wake up screaming in the middle of the night during a nightmare about sitting down to one of my meals.

They outlawed me from going in the kitchen other than to get a drink of water — and even then I had to have an escort. One day while I still took my turn once in month in preparing our meals a couple of other missionaries stopped by to visit us. When they learned I was the chef they bolted out the apartment and left the door swinging bouncing back and forth like a pinball.

Problem is, as a bachelor I’ve had to stomach my own cooking for about five decades — especially since I’m too cheap to pay fast food prices, although my former co-worker Dave and I occasionally eat at Dinks.

At my apartment, it’s not the Breakfast of Champions but the Brunch of Chumps.

Last week, for example, I threw together an eclectic concoction who won’t find in any cookbook south of the end of the world — hot dog chili sauce, multiple slices of cheese, barbecue sauce, mustard, catcher, cut up hot dogs, a little ground beef, an egg, onion powder, garlic powder and a two or three fistfuls of barbecue potato chips.

I love to smother catsup on the white gravy over chicken fried steak, eat macaroni and cheese with barbecue sauce, catsup and some kind of meat mixed in, mix pot pies with store-bought mashed potatoes and catsup (sensing a theme here?), or using mustard instead of salad dressing when I mix tuna fish.

Small wonder that when my sister was still alive and I spent three weeks every summer at her small townhouse she never let me cook. Now and then she let me cook bulk hamburger (there’s no one who cooks out grease from hamburger better than me. When I’m done browning five pounds, I’ve thrown away about a 32 ounces of grease and have about 32 ounces of dry little meat boulders left.

But back to my mission. We often made our own tomato sauce by boiling in a saucepan the snot out of real tomatoes. I took this to a whole new level. I think I boiled those little red goobers about six-to-eight hours one day. When combined with spices and sugar I put in that stuff was sweet enough to make a rhino smile — and just about as uneatable.

My specialty on my mission was making cake from scratch.

One day I didn’t have enough greased called for by the recipe so I simply used some old hamburger grease someone had put in a tin can on the stove. I thought to my, with all the other stuff, no one’s going to taste it. This was one my few delights even I couldn’t choke down.

Another time, we didn’t have regular salt, but we had a bag of rock salt set aside to put on icy sidewalks. No, I wasn’t dumb enough to grab a handful of rock salt and throw it in the batter. I tried to crumble it up between my hands and then put it in. Another cake that received a stamp of rejection of from roommates — although I managed to get it down.

On one New Year’s Eve, I decided to bake the most filling, taste-laden cake ever made in the history of the world. I don’t recall what all I put in. First, I made a double batter and then I added a cut-up apple, some pear slices, cut-up bananas and probably other stuff. It made perfect sense to me. There was no way in the world that poor oven could have cooked all that up solid, even with an extended warranty.

When I pulled out my sweet homage to the departing year, it was a big, bloated gooey mess. I don’t remember if any of the other guys ate some or not — I think they at least tried it.

As for me, it tasted great — the gift that kept on giving. I haven’t made a cake since.

Eventually, I toned down my kitchen kibitzing for the sake of the stomachs and health of my fellow companions, sticking to cold sandwiches, gnocchi (which is almost impossible to ruin), tortellini, hamburgers and other basic dishes.

During my Marine Corps years a little later in life, the chow hall did all our cooking. But, I’ve been on my own since.

No complaints. Pork and beans, a variety of meats, fruits/fruit juices, tuna fish, pot pies, shelled peanuts, occasional spaghetti boiled from scratch (I no longer make my own sauce) with Alfredo dressing, mac and cheese (once a week), ice cream, dark chocolate, fruit pies and a few other things dot my grocery list.

But in recent years and months I’ve cut drastically down on peanut butter (it’s great, but when I buy some it disappears like dew on the desert floor at sunrise), frozen pizzas, chili, potato chips, frozen french fries, soda, cookies and pastry.

Anyway, I remain in abject, lifetime repentance for what I did to the stomachs and taste buds of my former missionary companions.

May they, and the Almighty, forgive me.