Dec. 7: Cooking with Shteevie

I am a good cook.

When I say I'm a good cook, what I mean is that I can follow a recipe. I have friends who make a living in the kitchen and I have no desire to insult them by claiming to be a master chef. I am not a master chef. I am not even a chef. But I am a good cook.

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Yep, gimme some chicken legs and a box of Shake and Bake. Gimme some ground beef and some taco mix or Hamburger Helper or Hunt's spaghetti sauce and I will make a meal for you. Ash says the ground beef has to come from B&B, which is small grocery store/butcher shop a few blocks away from her apartment. She prefers their meat to what you get in the big chain grocery store. She can tell the difference when she eats it. 

Tacos are my specialty

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Last month, there was a five-day stretch or so where everyone else in the house was laid out with one of those bugs that was going around. It wasn't buggabugga (at least not according to the do-it-yourself tests that Jean Coutu gave us) so I didn't have to worry about going into the quarantine room. God has blessed me with a good immune system and has instructed me that I am to take care of people whose immune systems are not functioning as well as mine. 

Taking care of them includes cooking.

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Ash is very appreciative whenever I cook her a meal. She shows her appreciation by playing my favourite game, which is the see-how-many-times-I-can-send-Shteevie-back-to-the-kitchen game.

Here's how it works. Ash is sitting on the couch watching one of her shows, like Sister Wives or Dancing With the Stars or Racquetball Night in Uganda. Shteevie hands her a plate of spaghetti and meat sauce (and a fork) and then sits down on the couch. As soon as he is settled in - as comfortable as possible with a blanket around his legs and B-Man snuggled up next to him - Ash plays round one of the game.

"Will you go to the kitchen and get me a can of Pepsi?"

"Sure," Shteevie says, because he knows his mission in life is to make her happy and that he must never waver from that mission in the slightest degree. He brings Ash her Pepsi and then gets back on the couch. Ash then waits until he has achieved the maximum state of comfiness before starting round two.

"I need you to get me a big glass of cold water."

This makes me happy because there's nothing better than getting off a comfortable couch to get someone a glass of water. Seriously, this is the face I make everytime I am ordered out of my bliss.

After I bring the water, I will sit down on the couch, get comfortable, and start watching the Calgary Flames game on my tablet. Ash will wait until the Calgary Flames are on a power play before she starts round three.

"Will you get me an ice cream?" she will ask. I will go to the freezer and get her an ice cream bar and she will tell me she meant ice cream from Dairy Queen. I will tell her that what Dairy Queen offers isn't technically ice cream, it's a frozen dairy treat, and Ash will tell me to stop splitting hairs. I will go to Dairy Queen and get her ice cream. I will watch the power play goal that the Flames scored when I watch the highlights of the game the next day.

So now Ash has her ice cream and I am back on the couch and Ash decides to get really creative. She will say "go into the library, tear out every page 82 from every book on the second shelf, fold those pages into paper airplanes, and then get on top of the roof and throw them all down on to the street while you sing ABBA songs in Portuguese."

Which explains why I was on the roof last night, throwing pages on to Main Street and singing this:

Tu és a rainha da dança.

Jovem e doce, apenas 17

Rainha dançante

Sinta a batida do pandeireta, oh sim

Pode dançar, pode dançar.

Tendo o melhor momento da sua vida

Vê aquela rapariga, vê aquela cena.

Cavando a rainha dançante

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Get this. I am such a good cook that I can make puffed wheat cake. Here is puffed wheat cake:

Puffed wheat cake is a prairie delicacy. It is made with cocoa, corn syrup, brown sugar, vanilla, butter, and puffed wheat. I cannot make puffed wheat cake as well as my mom, who is the world undisputed champion of making puffed wheat cake and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and steak and basically everything. That is because no matter how hard I try, I cannot inject the secret ingredient, which is love.

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This is an opportune time to note that my Calgary friend, Jay del Corro, who turned 51 the other day, is the chef/owner of Eats of Asia. It is a failure of mine that I have never eaten at his restaurant. I can only blame geography for this as we live on other sides of the country. I would like to think that I lived closer, I would be a regular customer of his and he would likely hire me to do magic tricks for his clients now and then.

And if those clients asked, I would bring them Pepsi and water and stuff from Dairy Queen.