Vehemently Vitriolic

Its odd. Good cooking generally misses one or two members of a family. I bet almost no one has a grandma that wasn’t a completely kick-ass cook. Mine was (well, one of them anyway. Sorry other grandma. I love you to death, but those boulder cookies you made when I was 8 are STILL making their way through my colon). She baked bread and cookies and cakes, and there was nothing that she touched that didn’t become a piece of artwork. And yet, somehow, there is a relative who completely missed the lessons on how to make food properly. Not even properly…..but to not decide to “think outside the box” (pun intended) and start adding wacky food to other wacky food and then prance around and display it and lourde over it waiting for unsuspecting minions to accidentally try some.

Think back to those horrible family gatherings where someone would create that “thing” where a brightly colored, semi-sedintary, gelatinous blob kept the discarded bodies of canned mandarins in a perpetual stasis in a mould. Perhaps yours also had the by-products of peeled carrots. Perhaps marshmallow, or whipped-cream. Or someone else (like my wifes family) that used Special K as a crutch for EVERYTHING. Every casserole, every dish that needed something “crunchy”. It was all terrible and you almost invariably have your aunt to blame for it.

But, these are better days, and we know women should not be to blamer for all culinary attrocities. No, these days, we have equality, and so we must also blame our uncles.

Today in the mail I got a box of the most ultimately mis-nomered Perfection instant rice from Uncle Ben. Now, Uncle Ben and I have never been close. I’m not a racist, I just don’t care for his product. I have been known to use Aunt Jemima pancake syrup once in a while, so I figure if anyone calls me out on the race card, that should about cover it. But I thought, heck, I’m making tandoori chicken, so why not. Saves me from dragging out the rice cooker.

Following the instructions (the first step of which I swear says “Easiest Ever Method”) I put some water in a saucepan. Okay, well, seems fine so far. Add the rice. Check. Boil. Gotcha. Though I have never technically used the product before, and as such cannot personally vouch for how much easier this method is, I was slightly mystified as to the target demographic they normally sell to  if the four steps in total, which included “drain” and “fluff”, was now the gold standard the ruling elite geniuses would use to cook rice . Oddly, the presumably much much much harder second method of: 1 - Put rice in bowl 2 - Microwave was more difficult as it included pushing buttons on an appliance Uncle Ben feels so few people have mastered by 2008.

So far, Uncle Ben was about the same technique-wise as Grandma Basmati and Second-cousin-that-no-one-talks-about-and-isn’t-allowed-to-have-forks-or-knives Long Grain, so I had high hopes. Perhaps high is not the right word. Meager may be better.

After the 8-10 minutes of boiling “slowly”, the rice appeared to be done. It was “soft”. Reading step 3 (keen readers will recall I took the “Easiest Ever Method” which included 4, count ‘em, 4 steps), I drained the excess water and plated up. Chicken, mixed veg and some rice. Happy boy!

To describe the flavour is impossible. It simply is. The best I could do is if you think back to sometime when you first moved out and were poor and decided to add gin instead of milk to a box of KD…..you would be living large by comparison.

What the Uncle Ben people have done, to their credit, is add to the super exclusive club of foods that not only cannot be made to taste better smothering them with massive amounts of margarine, but that also cannot be fixed with  a can of mushroom soup.

The list of foods that fall into the “beyond the help of mushroom soup” is short. Minuscule. Asymptotically approaching zero one could say. Even binder twine made of burlap can be fixed with mushroom soup. You could boil a week-dead hamster in mushroom soup and it would taste allright. No, this club is extensively small. The VIP guest list is only the whos-who of terrible terrible ideas that marketers got ahold of.

And yet, the food scientists Uncle Ben employs have managed to crack the code to get themselves access to the club. Deciphering decades of poor decisions to come up with this ingenious product. Had we had them working on Enigma, the war may have been over in mere days.

After tasting it, I felt honoured that they felt so strongly about this, that they needed to tell the world and send me a box. That they had gone to such heights, such feats of epicurean engineering, to me anyway, truly epitomizes “Perfection”.