Guest Post! #BachelorCook Round 1

Hello everyone! So, as I mentioned a week ago, our friend Krysti declared her interest in cooking from our fridge. Something about it having more content than her own fridge. I agreed to let her cook for us on the condition she wrote a post about it for you all. I thought having someone else’s thoughts & comments might be a fun change. Upon reading this (and adding my commentary in the footnotes), I am now SURE having someone else’s thoughts & comments is a fun change. Hopefully, you all will encourage Krysti to do this again, and I can convince some of our other bachelor friends to do the same. IT’S AN ADVENTURE.

Thus begins Krysti’s quest…

Natasha and I have toyed with the idea of doing a guest blog post in varying degrees of seriousness the past few months1, then all of our dreams suddenly came true last week. My way of cooking is a complete 180 degree shift from Natasha’s approach. She puts together delicious meals that I have never tried before and I often happily leave with leftovers. I use whatever I can have on hand, rarely plan ahead, and use Mrs. Dash like it is going out of style. You may call it lazy – I call it efficient. Get ready.

Note: Throughout this post, lines preceeded with “#BachelorCook” are tips (also on twitter) I was offering throughout the night. Memorize these and you will learn the ways, grasshoppa.

Over the course of Wednesday morning, 04-Jan-12, while I was trying to forget about work (again), I messaged Natasha with, “Raw green pepper and Redbull do not taste good together2. I want to cook your food. Maybe Sunday.” She essentially replied “Tonight or bust, afterwards the fridge is going to be barren.” I may then have suggested that a moldy fridge will feel just like home.

The last comments we had that morning brilliantly foreshadowed the night’s cooking adventure:

“You like white wine?”
“Ya!”

“Ok good I have a lot…”

Now before we begin, let’s take an aside to look into the dregs of my own fridge for comparison’s sake.

Crickets.

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing out on anything in the doors – I think there’s an ice pack at the bottom of the freezer door from back when I tore up my knee. That’s it. This is my typical grocery list:

# Peppers
# Mushrooms

# Tomatoes

# Spinach

# Onions

# Chicken

# Tuna

# Bacon

# Cheese

# Eggs

# Diet coke

These 10 (11th is a bonus) ingredients can get you through just about meal. Breakfast is a quiche or a can of tuna, lunch is spinach/tomato/cheese salad, dinner is chicken stir fry, periodic snacks are raw peppers, cheese, or bacon. All very easy to put together. Pro-tip: to gut a tomato of its gooey seeds, bite off the butt end (not vine end) and stick your pinky in each of the four partitions to scoop out the seeds. Now that I have you convinced of my #BachelorCook-dom, let’s continue.

Jesus mary holy leaning tower of food! You will notice the blur of my hand as I quickly try to take inventory of whatever the hell is going on inside that freezer. I still don’t know how two people can accumulate that much food3. My work is cut out for me.

The explosion of the fridge wasn’t much better.

#BachelorCook looks for mold on an “on demand” basis. Meaning, as she grabs each turnip4.


I settled on whatever-the-heck-it-was tuna (Coho?) salmon (Uno?) fish (Yoko Ono?) with veggies. I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re a true bachelor and would never think of thawing the meat earlier in the day. Hell, I often don’t know what I’m going to have for dinner until I see it on the shelf. Therefore, the first task in any bachelor dinner is to thaw shit out from the freezer where it’s been sitting for who knows how long. Unless vacuum-packed, unwrap the meat and put it in a ziplock bag. Here comes the fun part: now you need to make it like the meat was vacuum-packed the whole time. This means suck all the air out of the bag. Trust me, the salmonella is worth the thawing time you’ll save by not having air as an insulator between the meat and the outside world5. Now run cold water over the bag, turning every once in awhile. It’s thawed when you can bend the center, or when you can’t feel your fingers anymore from holding a frozen ziplock bag under cold water for so long.

#BachelorCook As long as it’s the same texture and density and will cook the same? Surprise!


I diced a lot of turnips. The recipe called for 3 cups. I got to 9 cups before I even hit the second bag from the fridge. (A keen eye will note the tupperware full of turnips in the fridge self-portrait, earlier.)

#BachelorCook says when the veg sticks to the knife, it’s efficient. That way all you have to do us shake the knife over the bowl.


A recipe, you say…? Doesn’t this go against all of the laziness that #BachelorCook stands for?! Please note the complexity of the recipe – the bachelor version is as follows:

# Dice as many turnips as you have (or up to as many as you feel like dicing).
# Slice a few carrots.

# Chop an onion. The size of the onion pieces is inversely proportional to the onion-to-turnip ratio. AKA Fewer turnips = cut the onion into smaller pieces so it’s not so “holy shit I just put an entire onion into the pot”

# Wish you had cheese6.

# Combine #3 with #4, sorrowfully. Pretend the tears are involuntary from chopping the onion. We all know the truth.

# Boil #1-3; while (still not done?!) {keep getting drunk; keep boiling}

# You’re done.

The balance of any recipe is typically accounted for in one simple step: Mrs. Dash. Also known as the bachelor’s spice-rack-in-a-bottle7.

This is about the time I start telling you how I actually cooked these things, rather than just how I prepared them. Ahahahaha. Enter: The Faucet.

You will notice how the handle is pointing dejectedly towards the sink, not upward as one may expect with the water running. The plastic-Made-in-China special finally bit the dust. Fuck.

#BachelorCook says “The bathroom is now the auxiliary kitchen.”


Guess who got to run to the hardware store at 9 o’clock at night.

He was thrillllled (to say the least). We called it an adventure at the outset (bad things make my optimism go into overdrive). Before we left Natasha asked how I was planning to cook the fish. “I was going to put it in a pan… then turn it over.” I got a blank stare in response. He and I hastily made our way out the door, leaving her with bachelor-cooking instructions (#1 Do not over-complicate things) and she continued to tweet and cook.

When we returned home with new faucet in hand, Natasha finished making the dinner! So tasty. The salmon was a bit tough from being in the freezer for. a. year., but nothing a little salt and some beer can’t fix8. Next time I would cut the carrots thinner so the counterpart turnips didn’t get so soft while boiling.

After dinner, the real fun began… Replacing the faucet. A selection of tweets from Natasha (@MetaCookbook) who was so gracefully staying out of harm’s way, watching from the couch:

#bachelorcook has just asked for a hammer, a wrench & “a thin flathead screwdriver”. Also she said, “I bet if we just hit it with a hammer…”

“Maybe if we stare at it long enough, it’ll fix itself.” –@kmlesch, the #bachelorcook on my broken kitchen sink.

OMG @BillWeiss AND @kmlesch ARE DISCUSSING CUTTING SOME PLUMBING WITH A BREAD KNIFE. #seriouslynotenoughboozeintheworld

It’s a bad sign when @kmlesch goes looking for safety goggles because she’s afraid @BillWeiss is going to slice his face off. Right?

She’s not joking RT @kmlesch:#bachelorcook-ing with wine in 1 hand, drill bits in the other. Didn’t expect to be spending my Weds night like this.

“This is going to be a GREAT ‘you’re doing it wrong’ story.” -– @BillWeiss

Tipsy tweeting and everyone else doing the plumbing is, quite possibly, the best thing. cc @kmlesch @BillWeiss

HOLY CRAP, I HAVE A FAUCET AGAIN! And it’s far prettier and more useful than the last one.

And that, folks, is my first adventure in the land of #BachelorCook. I can only hope the next is as exciting as the first.



fn1. Months. A week. It’s really the same.

fn2. This is a surprise?

fn3. We’re like ants. We pack it away for the winter.

fn4. Here I thought I needed to ask an experienced little old lady how to decide what’s usable. Bachelors know it all, I guess.

fn5. Krysti’s next Christmas gift.

fn6. No one but Krysti will be surprised to read we had at least 7 kinds of cheese in there.

fn7. Krysti persevered admirably in the absence of Mrs. Dash in our kitchen. If she wants it, she’d best bring it next time.

fn8. And more wine, pre-beer. And a lemon & oil honey-mustard sauce I threw together knowing what she didn’t. Namely, that the fish had been in there a year or more. And SHE’S the lazy cook?

2 thoughts on “Guest Post! #BachelorCook Round 1

  1. Pretty much everything I wanted it to be–and more, with the destruction of the faucet. Hope the appliances and fixtures can handle Round 2.

Comments are closed.