Pitfall Satire

I Hate It When My Plate Looks Like a Crime Scene

And where are those police tape rolls when you really need one?

My kids love my cooking. As long as I stay within the confines of ‘normality’. Beef cheeks, Pig’s trotters, sea urchins, and lamb’s liver take some cajoling. And on occasion, I receive a flat “N.O.” — no way am I eating that.

Lobster Eggs was such a time.

I have spent some time working on harvesting lobster eggs as a business. They are a greenish tinge in colour and when cooked, turn coral or red. It does not harm the lobster and they taste extraordinarily good. It may end up being a retirement project.

A type of harmless caviar.

My kids have a saying, “Let’s not go all sea urchin with the food Dad, or lobster egg crazy here,” which is their way of saying do not cook one of your batshit crazy creations. Let’s keep it specifically GEN Z.

You know, … the type of batshit crazy food that paid for their private education. That batshit crazy.

Gen Z kids are only interested in muscle meat fillets and cheap yellow cheese.

My kids work and study in the UK because of language.

None of us can speak Italian, although I am an absolute whizz with hand gestures. I may have invented the only Italian-English cross-over sign language. Especially for phrases like — eat my shorts; suck on this; and — your mum shits with the bathroom door open.

I get text messages days before they are due to visit about things they want to eat.

“Pater, start marinading those chicken strips and don’t cut corners on the dipping sauces,” my middle daughter texted me.

“Paps, 3 seconds after the hug at the airport, I expect a Prego roll in my hands, or this holiday is off to a ropey start. And do not try and kiss me in front of my friend Lillia,” my youngest texts me.

Let’s just say, I am the “food guy” in my family. I have seriously thought of pitching an animated TV show, like Family Guy, but about food. My family writes 100 scripts a year for me.

While I’m here, mentioning Prego's …

You have got to try a Portuguese Prego roll. It is so simple. I am not sure if it originates in Portugal, but it is HUGE in South Africa.

South Africa and Mozambique (on our Eastern border), had/has a boatload of Portuguese immigrants living there. And the culinary influence morphed from there.

Recipe:

5 mm or 1/2 inch thinly sliced steaks. Not crappy silverside or topside. It’s cut quite thin so a little goes a long way, get something decent like NY strips (Sirloin) or better still skirt steak or Picanha — if reasonably priced. The Picanha cut has become hellishly expensive lately.

If you want to push the boat out — fillet steak.

Vegetarians — use large field mushrooms, remove the caps, and dice those up, slice the mushrooms so you have large flat pieces around 5 mm thick, like a steak. Add the diced mushroom caps to the marinade.

Put a smear of wet mild mustard on the steaks (or mushroom gills) like a thin smear of butter on a slice of bread, after seasoning them with salt and pepper. Marinade it in lemon juice, thinly sliced onion — don’t be shy, fresh garlic, sweet paprika, a hint of chili flakes (it must not be hot), lots of parsley, and olive oil for a few hours.

Sear meat quickly in a heavy preheated pan, with a little olive oil, and butter. It must not deep fry, it must sauté. Squirt the pan with a touch of lemon to deglaze the sticky bits off the bottom of the pan. It needs minimal cooking. You just want a bit of caramelisation on the meat surface.

Rest the meat on a plate.

Then caramelise the onions (add mushroom caps for vegetarians) from the marinade. DO NOT COOK TOGETHER WITH THE MEAT. The clean flavour of the lemon and meat is ruined if you do.

Meanwhile put a touch of mayo on one side of a crusty ciabatta-type roll, not a soft roll, and a bit of lettuce. No butter. Drizzle pan juices on the other side of the bread roll. Add the meat, drizzle a bit of the pan juices, cooked onion, and chomp away. They are 5 minutes of cooking and a lifetime of joy.

You can add roasted bell peppers, cheese, pickles whatever. But the garlic and lemon is essential. It must taste a bit garlicky-lemony.

Our house was a railway station on Saturdays, in my teenage years. And this was the sort of thing my mum would make in bulk, cover with fly netting, and just leave on the dining room table. We would quickly assemble the rolls and munch.

My kids love my sauces. Except one.

Tomato Sauce (Ketchup).

I make my own. It is delicious. They refuse to touch it. And yet they eat every other sauce I make. BBQ; Smoked BBQ; Cheese; Salsa’s; Cracked Black Pepper; my Honey Dijon Mustard sauce is eaten in ladles, as is my Peri Peri — all of them. But when it comes to Ketchup, they draw the line.

My numb nuts will not eat my ketchup. Unless of course, I pour it into the used Heinz ketchup bottle.

Oh yes, you read that right. I am a devious bastard.

Billions of dollars of marketing spend can be foiled with a decent funnel, a bit of time, and one cunning fucker.

My pet hate is those reverse ketchup bottles. They were invented by Hitler’s mum. Especially if you buy the own-store-brand knockoffs. They skimp to be cheaper, so their squirt mechanism was made by Hitler’s father. And we all know how shit his squirt came out.

You shake the bottle. Fine. You flip that lid open with an industrial crowbar. Fine. And then you tip the squirt bottle and nothing. Not fine. All you get is the wheeze of a poorly managed anal wind.

It’s not a good sound.

So you squeeze like your life depends on it and you haven’t eaten in a week.

Which is unlikely.

And still the bottle sounds like it’s recovering from a tracheotomy. And all that escapes the bottle is a bit of sprayed red sauce dots. It looks like a badly cleared-up time-of-the-month escapade. Only it’s all over your plate.

The plate looks like a Georges Seurat painting. Dots everywhere.

Now this looks like a good time to tell you that my delicious homemade ketchup comes in a glass bottle and can be spooned onto your food like a modern human should do it.

But no, my bunch of semen waste, is holding the ketchup bottle like an early primate still clutching the branch of the nearest tree.

Cause it’s better Dad

Fuck off it’s better. And so you apply more pressure to the stomach of the squeeze bottle, and like any well-pushed stomach, it then disgorges a diarrhea of red sauce all over the plate.

It looks like a frikken crime scene and your entire meal is awash with ketchup.

I wanted that much Dad. It was planned.

And all you can say is … Like fuck it was planned you primate ... and let me tell you, you were not planned. You were a bloody big mistake. Now enjoy your ketchup-infused prego. And go get a tampon to wipe this shit up.

PS — I’m looking for the inventor of the toothpaste tube. He owes me 18 kilograms of toothpaste that is still left in all my used tubes that I cannot retrieve. They’re in a box in my basement. Bastard.

PPS — I am looking for an investor for a range of paper towel products called

Tampon Absorbent Applicator

It is the perfect cross-over merchandising product. It will be shaped like a grenade, made from tampon material, and comes in various “strengths” for that huge table or floor spill.

Light spill; medium spillage; Heavy motherfucker.

I’ve watched a lady decant the Dead Sea from a jug, into one of those pads and it retains the entire Sea. So it’s good for Johnny's spilled juice fiasco.

If any woman actually let that amount of liquid go, she’d look like a prune sunbathing in a desert with 4 heat lamps and a bottle of Crisco.

It will have a string attached so the “man” in the house thinks he is pulling a grenade pin. It’s how we roll ladies. If he wears combat boots while doing it, let him. It’s aspirational.

Uve out.