This week’s Friday Five is about food.
1. What was the first thing you ever cooked? Probably scrambled eggs and bacon. I vaguely remember working with my siblings to prepare breakfast for Mom on Mother’s Day.
2. What’s your signature dish? I’m not a competent enough cook to really have a signature dish, but my family seems to think I know how to prepare pizza. It’s true that I worked for three summers as a cook at Pizza Hut, and I can competently build and bake a pizza, but if you ask me to make the crust, I’m more or less helpless. At Pizza Hut, the dough was premixed by the time I got hold of it, and I used a spiffy electric roller to produce nice, even, flat crusts. When I’ve tried to produce a crust by hand with a rolling pin, it has always come out uneven and lumpy. So these days I prefer to use one of the ready-made pizza crusts you can buy, and build on top of that. Bobolis also work OK.
3. Ever had a cooking disaster? (tasted like crap, didn’t work, etc.) Describe. Sure, lots of them. That’s why my family rarely lets me cook any more. I’m just no good at it.
4. If skill and money were no object, what would make for your dream meal? No object? Hmm, that means I could hire a team of biotech researchers to develop low-calorie versions of some of the foods that I used to scarf down when I was in college, but wouldn’t dare eat nowadays (because I don’t ever want to weigh 230 pounds again). I could also hire Stephen Hawking to build me a time machine, so I could visit restaurants that closed years ago. With that infrastructure in place, I would take my family to eat at Adger’s Wharf in Charleston, SC, circa 1985, when it was the best seafood restaurant I had ever set foot in. (I don’t even know if it’s still in business, but the last time I ate there, sometime in the late ’90s, it was under new management and was a mere shadow of its former self.) And if calories were no object, I would also want to visit Yesterday’s, in the Five Points neighborhood of Columbia, SC, and have the Confederate Fried Steak one more time.
5. What are you doing this weekend? Tonight, having dinner with with Miles (a friend from way back who’s been living in Europe for several years, but is in town for a couple of weeks). Saturday, attempting to install a second satellite dish with the help of several friends who actually have a clue how to do that. Sunday, attending a party in Miles’s honor. I also have a new computer, monitor, and laser printer that are still in their boxes because I haven’t had time to unpack and install them. I like to think I’ll get a chance to do that this weekend, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it.