Guide to Shitty Bachelor Cooking.

A very high percentage of my caloric intake is sandwich based. Very high. To the point where I will tell you bluntly: I am not qualified to write a guide to cooking. I know how to cook. I can keep myself alive in an urban survival situation such as “I won’t get any money until Tuesday” (I don’t and never will believe in credit cards, they are tantamount to death for any modern man who strives for creativity, but then again so is starving to death, so you have to pick your battles sometimes) with astonishingly little in the pantry, and not through begging borrowing or stealing either, so a lot of what I know about cooking literally involves swallowing my pride, if you’ll pardon a crude joke.

I genuinely believe that women are smarter than men for a number of reasons, but the one I’m fixated on now, while thinking about cooking, is how much faster they learn than we do. We never learn. If we ever do learn, it’s by a process so long and drawn out and repetitive and inherently idiotic that learning something as simple as “eating good, tasty food is a good idea, and cooking is cheaper and better for you than not cooking” involves such torturous and unnecessary mistrials as “I tried putting creamed corn on spaghetti once in college.” Women know better from the very getgo, because they know how to chew and/or savor their food, and if they don’t, they damn well learn through a combination of osmosis and caution that you never put fucking creamed corn on pasta and call it a meal unless you’re half-retarded from arrogance and/or potsmoking.

My girlfriend just called me to confirm why she’s smarter than me. She’s had a rough day. Some noise about health insurance and impertinent daily inconveniences and emotions that are getting the better of her because she’s getting her period, not that she or anybody else needs that as an excuse to be emotional. Something like that. I’m not exactly sure what she was talking about. As soon as my dinosaur brain formed the phrase “ranting for the sake of catharsis” as a descriptor of what she was doing I put her on speakerphone and wandered around my apartment changing into my comfy shorts and getting a glass of water and paying about as much attention to the talking voicebox as I would to a semi-interesting NPR story. I don’t think she noticed, and it wouldn’t matter all that much if she did, except she’d have to add “insensitive boyfriend” to the list of badday topics to burn through, possibly in a separate subsequent ranting on the phone with her mother, who is more suited to the task anyway. Truth be told, I’m having a bad day of my own and I can’t always listen because I’m a dude and we’re stupid that way.

Anyhoo, the point is all this behavior makes her smarter than me and all guys, because she’s blazing her way, wildfirelike, through everything that’s upsetting her right now today, and it’s admittedly poisonous and futile (I mean, health insurance in America? You’re never going to complain that one away, babe) but she’s at least lancing those boils and maintaining the wounds on a regular basis, which is more than I can say for most dudes, who never trust anybody (including themselves) to confess vulnerability in the face of the overwhelming exponential bullshittiness of everyday living enough to let all of it out, so it just turns into this long tedious distracting echochamber of self-restraint and self-advice that never stops until you’re so hungry and indecisive you’re willing to try creamed corn on spaghetti. I can also guarantee that she’s going to sleep like a dead guy in brick pajamas tonight, while instead of luxuriating in the extra space of a separate bed night I’ll be tossing and turning wondering if she’s justifiably going to sneak in and stab me to death in my sleep. This is why we need women. They’re smarter than us, and once in a great while they trick us into spilling our guts. And they know it. And if we’re sufficiently infantile they might take pity on us enough to cook us a meal here and there if they feel like we’ve earned it.

This is neo-chauvinism, I know, but hey, we’re also at least trying to pretend to listen to those speakerphone rants too. There’s some codependant quid-pro-quo. Maybe it evens out, I don’t know. Hopefully some guilt will set in soon and I’ll actually clean my bathroom as a not too misguided form of penance. It sure is dirty.

This brings me to the ever-present male delusion of our times, which is a rare case of good delusion because it spurs us on to unforeseen heights of action towards near-adequacy, and it is namely: “We’re not totally pathetic, here. We were doing just fine by ourselves before you got here, honey, and if you’re not careful you’ll find we’ve grown nostalgic enough to go back to those days while you cry in your pillow for weeks and weeks about how you just missed out on your only chance at happiness (us) and meanwhile we’ll be totally fine forever.” Empty threat city. This is the lie we tell ourselves sometimes when the girlfriend speakerphone rants hit us on bad days of our own. But it is as I said a positive-action delusion because it makes us kind of want to know how to do things like cook a meal. And not just a sufficient-for-survival-while-nobody’s-looking meal like creamed corn on spaghetti. A meal that’s tasty and good for you and well presented and a hit at parties. And we cooked it. All by ourselves. Without you, baby, so there! Muh! And other such childishness.

Of course if you don’t have a girlfriend, you definitely need to get one at least eventually somewhere down the road. They’re great. Not even joking. One way to help yourself get one is to learn how to cook past Cheetos. I mean get yourself a couple of showpiece meals and learn how to make them within some reasonable degree of predictable ediblehood, and use those mealcooking ideas to not only attract females, but ensnare them once they’ve been successfully attracted. Everything else is just bachelorfeed for sustenance. You could sustain yourself with dogbiscuits alone. Almost. Some bachelorfeed sustenances earn you girl points, though. For example, grilled cheese mastery has a certain chappy charm to it that you can entreat to a ladyfriend.

Point is: nobody wants to date a baby. So there’s gotta be some basis to that old “I was doing just fine before you came along” lie, or else you’re going to be in some serious spiritual trouble in the ah-ha-ha-look-at-that-walking-joke-disguised-as-a-dude-who-can’t-cook-or-clean-or-do-laundry-without-his-wetnurse-of-a-girlfriend department (and possibly he doesn’t even have a girlfriend, and is therefore chronic enough to forever be in no danger of the whole question because he’s in fact looking for a real live wetnurse still and that job ain’t a growth market, not for him at the file clerk salary-based rates he’s offering). There’s gotta be some shame in there, fer Chrissakes.

So there are certain bare minimum standards to operate from here. You (any “you”) should be able to cook:

-Breakfast.

-Pasta with a variety of sauces (creamed corn doesn't count).

-Stir fry.

-Some kind of soup (chili counts).

-Options for the "Basic American Meal" (a featured meat with sauce, a starch, and a vegetable--creamed corn might count).

-Sandwiches (completely locked down—fistbump).

-And you should at least feign competence at a grill, lest some erstwhile rival correctly crow “homo” in the middle of a woopitch or just-for-practice guytime.

If you don't meet all those criteria then you're a bullshit dude who doesn't know anything about how the world works, at least in the eyes of said rivals and potential mates. This is a list of real meals. This is not a list of microwaveable-Coldwar-atrocities-in-a-bag(s) that say the words “breakfast, “pasta,” “stir fry,” “soup,” “Basic American Meal,” “sandwich,” or “feigned competence at a grill” on them. These are simple meals which demand a working knowledge of preparation from a minimum of semiscratch, without the illustrious help of Sara Lee or Ore Ida.

Start cooking one of those requirements (the easiest way to force yourself to do this is to paint yourself into one of those corners where you’ve only got 40 bucks to keep you alive until Wednesday when the unemployment check comes—a valid lifestyle option for the self-taught) until you've got it all squared away, and then keep moving until your repertoire includes all of those dishes.

Recipes are for chumps. "Joy of Cooking?" Yeah right. More like "Joy of Not Being Able to Afford a Footlong BMT from Subway Everyday For The Rest of Your Life." Shy of reaching for that ignoble brass ring, in the mortal territory we live in where food is necessarily cooked, you don’t need recipes. They’re just going to make you take too long to cook something while you sully too many dishes and make three trips to the store buying things you forgot, and wondering the whole time what the hell a garlic press is, and if you have one, and if so how to use it correctly, and if not you’ll debate whether or not you really need it and how to reproduce its unknown effects and you’ll second guess yourself all the way until you drop dead of starvation in the middle of your kitchen.

Or worse, you'll find that you've accidentally skipped a recipe step and you won't know what to do to correct it because you were marching in lockstep with a recipe, and now here's some half-cocked complicated quiche torte without baking soda in it staring you in the face and you don't know if you'll even be able to eat it when all's said and done. If this happens, you will be tempted to just run out of your kitchen with the rangetop going at full blaze and continue out of your house, leaving your front door open, further and further down the street, out of your neighborhood, your town, your country, and into a new life with a new identity. Maybe in this one you'll wear hats. That's how aggravating it is to fuck up a recipe.

Recipes are, in short, a recipe (I am so very sorry for not being able to resist) for ruining everything in a way that doesn’t teach you anything but to be afraid of cooking. If you stay away from recipes, you might subject yourself to some pretty severe fuckups, but that way you’re learning the hard way, which is how we rockheaded dudes have to learn things. What things? In the case of cooking it’s little lessons like how flavors work together and temperatures by which certain meats become nonfatal and helpful little hints like "you need to soak dried beans for like a day before you can cook them, idiot, or else you’re essentially going to be chewing on a tasteless inedible bean-based arts and crafts necklace which for all its apparent flavor you might as well have made fifteen years ago at Keokukahooniewoo’s Quaint Li’l American Indian Cultural Insensitivity And Bedwetting Humiliation Factory Summer Camp that you were shipped to as a kid so your parents could fuck like crazy while you fed mosquitoes for two weeks. And you, broke dummy that you are, will have no choice but to call it dinner."

Don't get too discouraged if you screw something up to the degree where it’s just on the sunny side of deadly poison. Even if you just wasted your last batch of food with a horrible experiment and you don't know when your next meal is coming, you still have friends and the human body is capable of miracles in a survival situation. Don't worry.

Hopefully you will fuck something up just that bad, too, because it takes a certain boldness of vision and steely resolve in the face of occasional grand scale disasters to come up with a girlworthy showpiece meal. Surprise attack your tongue. Combine things you wouldn’t think go together but you’re willing to at least try because you like both of them. Like, say, balsamic vinaigrette and peanut butter. That could work. What the hell do you know better? You’re a dude just like me. And I’ve tried just such a thing, if not that exact thing, and I’ve lived to tell bout it, and now I’ve got at least a month’s worth of meal ideas to show for it. For instance: did you know that apples can be a pretty kickass omelet ingredient? Well they can be, and the reason why I know that is because I was down to two eggs and an apple this one time. And also I’m a culinary paragon (don’t tell my girlfriend I’m not).

So what? I’m sitting here reading nothing new and you’re polishing your knob for no discernable reason. I know how to put apples in an omelet. I’m not braindead. That’s not the problem. The problem is motivating myself to actually buy eggs and apples in the first place.

In "Oprah’s Dietician’s Shitty Bachelor's Guide to Cooking Number 3,418" there's probably a chapter about this where it says, "The number one reason why dudes are so afraid of cooking is because if they don't eat their produce in time it will spoil and ruin their investment." Actually, I don't know if it says that, but it should. It's a valid point. If you're a dude on the go, it's pretty bogus to spend like 20 bucks on food that will most likely rot before you eat it.

So here are some solutions:

A. Don't buy food that spoils. This is what most dudes end up doing, and it's why dudes have a reputation for eating tater tots and fruit roll-ups for dinner. But you've got more options here than you think. Like frozen veggies keep for a pretty long time. And so do canned veggies. And so do most grains. Vacuum sealed tofu packages are good to go for a while. You can freeze meat if you’ve got a microwave, or even if you don’t (but if not you have to be patient and cook things before you’re actually hungry for them).

B. Don't buy way more shit than you're ever going to eat before it spoils. I know it's dude logic to feel like you can go to the grocery store once every six months and be set for life, but food's not the same as laundry. In Europe, I hear, they only go out and buy what they're going to eat that day. I think that's their trick for not being super fat. Like they're not afraid to buy a vegetable over there because it will rot in two weeks. They just eat it that night. I know talking about Europe as if it’s “the coolest, man” is the shittiest thing you can ever do, and I’m not even really sure they work this way out there except for “the coolest, man” stereotypes, but let’s say that first: they do this in Europe and this is true, and second: they’re right on this one. Just buy enough for that night. It probably won’t turn you all European with tinted shades and overdesigned sneakers that look like some kind of putrid midlife crisis Lamborghinimobile.

C. Cook large portions and save the leftovers. Congratulations on your gigantic pot of homemade spaghetti sauce. Now you've got some delicious sauce just sitting there in the fridge for you to eat later. It's like having nothing but free meals for two straight days. Way to go. You're like Superman, but for eating. It turns out food is like laundry sometimes.

D. If transportation is a problem for food (or laundry), get yourself one of those Old Ukrainian Lady™ carts.

And that’s all I’ll say about food shopping and storage. I’ll spare you all the ra-ra “organic foodie lifestyle” garbage, because you’re not going to buy into it anyway unless you already do, in which case what the hell are you doing listening to me? You should be telling me what to do and recommending a wine for my spaghetti and creamed corn mishaps while I middlefinger you to oblivion behind your besainted foodasshole back. The rest of us need more basic help and we’re not afraid to admit it because if we ever want our penises shined on periodweek we’ve got to cook a decent meal once our speakerphoned girlfriends (real or imagined) are done telling us about the latest scandalous epithets hurled back and forth between her and that fatassed work nemesis Blahblahblah. And we should probably buy candles while we’re at it for extra points.

Well there you go.

If none of this stuff works, you can always just go to Potbelly's and tell them Ben Johnson sent you and they will look at you funny for a split second before the recognition kicks in. Then they’ll give you a discount because I’m pretty sure I just celebrated my millionth sandwich over there and they probably know me by reputation if not name. Maybe.