Don't Go in the Walk-in, Gordon!

I'm not sure how we got started doing this, but my daughter and I binge watch two of the older Gordon Ramsay series, Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell. 

In case you've been slaving in the kitchen of a substandard restaurant for the past 20 years and haven't been paying attention, Gordon Ramsay is the British chef, enfant terrible, bad boy extraordinaire who berates the shows' dumb-dumb restaurateurs, innkeepers and hoteliers brave enough or stupid enough to ask him in for a consult; this is when their businesses are just a rotten smell away from going under. And judging from the looks, rotten smells abound in these places, and thank God no one has perfected Smell-O-Rama.

Not everyone who invites Ramsay over for advice is a dumb-dumb. Often they are the spouses or partners of the dumb-dumbs, and their savings are fast dwindling because the dumb-dumbs were dumb enough to get them into these messes. The place is being run into the ground by the dumb-dumb's poor cooking, poor business planning or outright selfishness. Gordon is sympathetic to the dumb-dumb's much better half even as he is all in the face of the dumb-dumb. 

In the case of Kitchen Nightmares, it's pretty much inevitable that Gordon will venture into the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator. It's the restaurant reality show equivalent to a teen in a slasher movie saying, "I'll be right back!" 

"Don't go in the walk-in, Gordon!" I shout at the screen, but Gordon doesn't listen and goes in anyway where he finds himself in a haunted house of rotted beef, moldy pasta and slimy chicken. Gordon shoves his arms wrist deep into the gunk just to gross us out even more and to give himself added justification for a string of bleeped out expletives. Sometimes Gordon rushes out of the walk-in and straight to the nearest trash bin where he heaves up one of the awful meals prepared for him earlier by that episode's dumb-dumb.  Some of my favorite Ramsayisms include, "Wow-wow-wow-wow, wow," "Look at that!" (gasped in hushed tones like someone who's peeked beneath the casket lid's lower half to find that the deceased isn't wearing any pants), "Looks like a dog's dinner," and "I've eaten that!"

To give you an idea just how dumb the dumb-dumbs get, in one episode, a wife learned she was co-owner of a ramshackle, money-sucking, badly decorated inn when her husband called her up and said, "Guess what!" In another, a father who has raided his son's savings to buy a restaurant, proceeds to bend Gordon's ear about what a jerk his father was. 

We also binged season one of Hell's Kitchen where Gordon takes wannabe restaurateurs and screams and yells at them through a series of competitions until one of them wins a restaurant where they can hire their own staff to yell at. 

It sounds like a dream come true. (No, it doesn't!)

If You Can't Stand the Heat, Get Out of My Kitchen

We haven't had a kitchen fire in my home for almost a week. I know that's not much of an accomplishment for most families, but in my household, kitchen fires are such frequent occurrences that not having one for six days is a reason to celebrate. In fact, kitchen fires happen so often in my home that these days they hardly faze the kids.


The last time we had a kitchen fire was when my sandwich burst into flames. I was pitching it in the sink just as my son strolled by.

"Hey, Mom, what happened?" he asked in the same tone he also says, "Hey, Mom, how are you?"

"My sandwich caught on fire," I explained in the same tone I also say, "Not bad. How are you?"

He looked at the sandwich and said, "Maybe your sandwich took one look at you and you were so hot, it combusted."

When a friend of mine who shall remain nameless heard that, she suggested I get the boy's eyes checked. At first I took that as a crack about my cooking then realized it was a crack about my looks. Not all of us can age as gracefully as you, PATTY!

Another time I was on the phone with someone while attempting the death-defying feat of cooking while talking. A wall of flames shot up off the stove-top, across the microwave and over four of the cabinet fronts. On the other end my friend heard the whoosh of the fire, followed by rapidly repeating clanking noises as I rearranged the pans on the burners and doused the flames with baking soda.

"Holy mother of God!" he yelled. "What happened?"

"Oh, it's fine," I said. "I just had a little fire on the stove. Speaking of mothers, how's yours?"

I recently learned that my own mother had similar challenges. Our circa 1940 "state-of-the-art" stove had a temperamental broiler that set dinner on fire on a regular basis. My father was always at work when this happened and since dousing fires was not my mother's forte, she would scream for our neighbor, Ray who would rush over and knock out the flames.

I'm not sure what it says about my mother that another man had to put her fires out while my father was at work. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what it says about my father. Oh wait - yes I am.

At construction sites they sometimes post a sign heralding their safety record. The signs say things like: 137 days without an accident! I'm going to do something similar in my kitchen. If I posted a sign tonight, it would read: Six days without a fire!

I know what the root cause of my kitchen fires is: multitasking - cooking while breathing, cooking while blinking, and as in my earlier example, cooking while talking. Cooking while not a cook sums them all up, I think.

I should be embarrassed about all this, but instead, I'll stand proudly by my sign: Six days without a fire! 

Actually, it's not going to be a sign exactly; it's going to be a dry erase board I can update every day, and any day now, reset to zero.