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!)

Treats

I have a history of eating dog treats, and I never seemed to find them; they seemed to find me. 

Image: Teece Aronin

When I was about two years-old, our next-door neighbor plopped me down in the grass of her backyard, face-to-face with her cocker spaniel, Reggie. Then she shook some crunchy, colorful dog treats into my tiny, cupped palms. 

"Reggie loves treats," she said, and walked away. 

I looked at Reggie. Reggie looked at me. I took one of the treats between my finger and thumb and held it in front of Reggie's black-lipped, drool-y muzzle, at which point, he tilted his head, leaned in, and gently took it. Cheerfully, he crunched it up, then looked expectantly at me.

He must be waiting for me to take my turn, I decided, so I put one of the treats in my mouth and chewed. The dog looked crestfallen. 

Then, I gave a treat to him, and the dog cheered up. When I took my next turn; the dog looked devastated. 

And so it was that Reggie learned to share. Reggie's owner moved away a few years later and couldn't take him along. Knowing how much I loved him, she asked my parents to take him in. They did, and he was my heart for many years.

One night a few months ago, my daughter, Sydney invited her friend, Maddy to a sleepover. Syd and Maddy are "dog people," and since I ate enough dog treats with Reggie that day to become part dog, my daughter might have earned her dog person status partly through genetics. 

It was early Saturday morning when I stumbled into the dimly lit kitchen, yawning and rumpled. Both girls were asleep in the living room. On the counter were these cute little ginger snappish things, and without thinking, I popped one in my mouth. It turned out to have come from a box of treats Maddy brought over for our dog. 

"Rule Number One:" lectured a friend," If it's in your kitchen but you don't know how it got there, do NOT put it in your mouth."

Actually, it didn't taste that bad, and it brought back memories of when I was plopped down in the grass and told that Reggie loved treats.