Category: Food

After reading Charlie’s ‘Like Oil and Coconut’ entry and laughing hysterically, I was reminded of a hilarious encounter I have had with oil. I love the stuff and regularly use far too much of it when I cook, or at least too much according to you fat Americans… those last two words remind me of something I was told by a post office clerk yesterday here in England when I tried to pay with my debit card that does not have this integrated chip that all English people have in theirs.

Luke: “My debit card does not have a chip like all you English have.”

Mail guy: “It’s because all you Americans have eaten all the chips.”

I laughed and reminded him that the English are just as fat nowadays and then we stared at each other. But let me get back to the point of this entry. This is the story of how I enjoyed the benefits of a deep fryer I had found deep in the cupboards of my parents’ house. I wonder why they hid it so far back in the cupboards and never told me about it?

I returned to my Newport Beach house with 5 gallons of corn oil, a deep frying machine that could just about hold a whole chicken, and a grin that extended from 34th street to 52nd. My first experiment was a bunch of chicken finger things we had in the freezer. It was easy: dump the oil in the machine, press the button, wait until it says it’s ready, and then put whatever you want inside. As far as how long, the machine gave recommendations on the lid for various types of common deep-friable food. The result of the first experiment was a load of extremely tasty chicken fingers that could not have been eaten fast enough by me and my underfed roommates, except for Ian, who ate as if he had a large tapeworm inside him. He also was huge and could beat three of us up at the same time, with me trying to choke him hanging on his back, he had Phil in a painful arm lock, and had Pat just held on the ground with some magical power with his other arm.

I decided I wanted to be a little more creative and for the next experiment tried a quesadilla. This was tougher since I had to use something to keep the quesadilla in the correct position otherwise everything would fall out. Everyone was skeptical but in the end it came out fantastically and I was happy to share with my roommates. Best quesadilla I have ever had.

Here is when things got interesting… part of my regular diet was grilled cheese sandwiches and since I was running around saying that anything dropped in this wonder machine was coming out perfectly, I had to try my favourite food inside it. I received immediate disapproval from everyone around but I had to persevere otherwise my deep fryer would lose all of its integrity. The oil at this point was collecting bits and bobs inside it from previous foods but I claimed this would only add flavor, and plus… what the hell do you do with 5 gallons of dirty oil? So I butter up the bread, throw an extra amount of cheese on it, pin the bread together to ensure sealage, and drop it in.

I gave it five minutes and brought it out. It looked really good, I must tell you. It was very crispy but the sort of light crisp that you like to gobble up off your plate after eating some fried fish or something. It was an interesting brown but not burnt. A crowd had developed and was interested in the results and I could tell that they thought it might have actually worked. I bit into it with a nice sizable bite and immediately about 6 fluid ounces of oil rushed into my mouth. Obviously the bread had soaked it all up and encapsulated it in the previously mentioned crisp. I struggled not to gag and chewed and swallowed. I could not taste cheese or anything else but it did not necessarily taste bad. It is just a really weird feeling. I didn’t make a face and tried to convince everyone it was good and they should try but because of my slow deliberate chew with no face, but definitely no smile, I could not convince them. Begrudgingly I admit, it was a failure and I did not finish my sandwich. So I no longer say to everybody as they eat deep-fried fish heads and Snickers… “you can deep fry anything and it will be good.”

P.S. As a final note on this story, I will tell you how I disposed of the oil. In a moment of complete stupidity, I went out back and dumped it in the trash can and walked inside. I had no idea that modern trash cans put holes at the bottom to not let them fill up with water or trash sludge. I left for an hour or so and came back to my neighbor screaming at me and threatening to call the authorities (whoever it is for this kind of thing, the EPA I suppose) unless I cleaned it up. Mind you I lived in Newport Beach, a very posh area, about 100 feet from the beach, and a fine for something like this is on the order of $10,000. I spent the next three hours blowing all my non-existent cash buying clean-up materials and sand cleaning that stuff up. Apparently you take that stuff to an auto store…

P.P.S. This reminds me of when I changed the oil on my motorcycle at a different house but still in Newport using 2-litre bottles. I had a 600cc Katana. Apparently two and a half Coke bottles and some random plastic thing is enough to contain all that oil so when I ran out of containers I thought I would just let the last remaining bit go on the ground. Turns out there was a lot more and the complex had to come clean it up and they eventually charged us. I got them back by going backwards over those things that pop tires in parking lots and shredding a 13-inch gash in my exhaust pipe making my motorcycle sound like a Harley and going to soccer practice at 6am.

I know, I can be really stupid. No people or baby seals were hurt in these oil fiascos.

In the last few years it has become very popular to deep fry a turkey in the United States, or at least in southern California. I suppose this is due to the fact that we are all getting lazier and claim to be so busy that we do not have the time to cook such splendid feasts anymore, like the ones we have been having with Kurt and Jamie the last few years. (Thank you both for the splendid memories.) So my Dad is a pretty good cook — I will admit that he can make a killer roast and a spectacular gravy. And for an English man these are two very important things, considering a roast is a national staple food and gravy is mandatory to hide the fact that the English haven’t used salt since World War II. One Thanksgiving, with the help of my good friend Pat, we attempted to deep fry a turkey and the following picture I find to be very revealing of how it went.

I love this picture because it opens my mind and lets me actually relive this particular moment in my life. As in any good Where’s Waldo book, it contains all the elements necessary to construct an amazing story. (I do apologise for the distorted proportions but this was a photograph taken of a photograph since the Argentines want to charge me 3 pesos a picture for scanning and no one has a scanner.)

There’s no mystery to how to deep fry a turkey. You basically buy a large amount of cooking oil, fill up a steel cylinder with the stuff, then put it on top of a jet burner attached to a sufficient supply of compressed gas — which is just out of the frame of this picture, but rest assured, it is there and filled to the brim. You put the turkey onto a metal holding device so you can lift the turkey out of the soon-to-be-scalding pot after some prescribed time. This is all told to us on the outside of some box that the stores will sell to anyone over the age of 6. This simple description is what we thought was all that was needed.

Insert catalyst one, and probably the most important catalyst. Pat is holding a crystal glass filled with some 18-year-old whiskey and there is another glass behind my dad’s left arm. No doubt mine was within arm’s reach. I cannot say how far into the lovely bottle of Scotch we were at this point but it is sufficient to say that we were all enjoying the moment immensely, despite some of the next few statements I am about to make.

We are all wearing sandals, which is normal for California (except for my dad wearing socks with his sandals), but probably not a good idea when there is a large flame at full blast just about ankle level.

Notice the ground is all wet. Well it isn’t really wet, I would say. I am not sure how you describe something that is all covered in oil, but that is what the ground was — covered in oil. What happened was my dad filled the cylinder with oil, to the top. We then turned the heat on and waited until the stuff was boiling. Then we start lowering the 20-pound turkey into the oil. Pat, my dad, and I are sharp guys and it didn’t take long to realise that we should have measured the amount of oil to put in with the turkey already in the cylinder, not empty. (You use water to accomplish this beforehand.) So either way we make a game-time decision while hovering the turkey in the air and decide that there is no way we can just wait for the oil to cool down and discard some of it, so we just drop the turkey into the oil. The whole time oil is cascading over the edge of the cylinder and flowing directly over the jet flame underneath the cylinder. I do not know how there was no explosion, but there wasn’t.

What am I doing anyway? Well the box comes with two hooks that are used to lift and lower the turkey out of the cylinder. At some point we thought it would be a good idea to drop one of the hooks into the cylinder and cook it with the turkey. This great idea made it very difficult to lift the turkey out. In the end we constructed our own reinforced hook out of some coat-hanger type metal and dug around for the other hook, dropped it on the ground and let it cool off before we used it again.

All that brown stuff behind Pat is the usual oak tree clutter that would collect on the ground at my house. Likely very flammable.

In the end the turkey was not that bad. If anything maybe a little dry, but the gravy hid that fact. We likely let it cook too long while we dug around for the hook. I am forever a fan of using the oven or burying your food with coals and will not attempt deep frying again. However it did make for a good story.

After dinner, we cleared everything away and everything looked fine except for the fact that there was a giant oil slick on our patio. I say to Pat, “Hey you should try and slide across the oil slick. It would look hilarious and you would appear to be moonwalking.” And of course Pat responds, “Yeah, that is a great idea.” Now this was a great idea, trust me, but the problem was that Pat had some image in his head that he could run up to the oil slick and just slide for 20 yards or something, casually looking around and tipping his hat and winking at the ladies as he glided. It’s one thing to see people fall, but the moment Pat hit the oil slick, he immediately fell in the fastest fall I had ever seen. A fall so fast that I am sure Pat was hurting severely but because it was so unexpected he couldn’t help but think he had broken some natural law and we all had to laugh about the audacity of that even happening. He got up, slightly oily, and we toasted to one of the better Thanksgivings I have ever had.