Our hearts were in the right place but our culinary abilities were, as far as I could tell, down the street in the pub. Yesterday my good friend Sexy Realtor and I decided to make jerk chicken tacos. Our success was limited, and our tummies left half empty.It started off quite easily. The chicken jerked perfectly and the wine – guava juice for me - flowed swiftly. Our supper's fate began to make its ominous presence known when, due to a complete lack of foresight, we jerked the chicken with the bones still in it. This is was silly because one sign of a successful taco is when you don't have to pick bones out of your teeth when you eat. Another is when you do not experience internal bleeding and intestinal infection due to chicken bone splinters lodges in your digestive tract. No Martha Stewart I, but I do know how to make a taco. And so we set to work deboning the jerk.
Sexy Realtor used a knife. I know myself much too well to entrust myself with a sharp, pointy object. I reasoned that whatever damage I could inflict would be much lessened if I used my fingers. Good thing.
When one is deboning chicken one must dive right in with abandon. I am a highly-strung and excitable individual who bottles up much of my frustration with the incredibly inane people with whom I come into contact daily, and so I relished the opportunity to rip flesh from bone, even if it was just a jerked chicken.
When one is using one's fingers with food covered in sauce, one must be careful not to get the sauce anywhere but on the food. This would be true of any sauce, but particular attention should be paid to sauces that stain and hot, spicy, sauces, such as jerk sauce, for example. One should never, say, laugh uproariously at something hilarious one's co-chef has said, and reach up to wipe away a little laugh tear from one's face without first rinsing the caustic solution from one's fingers. The consequences could be dire.
The pain in my right eyeball was instantaneous. It felt is if it were self-combusting while boring its way back into my brain at the same time. I hadn't known such agony since I sat all the way through "Alexander" because the extremely sexually attractive man I was dating at the time insisted on seeing it. My brain emptied itself of all thoughts save survival.I ran blindly in circles around Sexy Realtor's kitchen. His five thousand pound chocolate lab with halitosis thought I was playing an amusing game and yipped and jumped half a pace behind me, tugging at my shirt with his fangs. My friend managed to fend off my flailing arms and lead me to the sink, but I tripped on squirming the dog and hit my head on the corner of the counter. I decided to wait for death, shivering in a heap on the kitchen floor while the dog covered my face with sloppy, malodorous affection.
Due to the excitement, we forgot to finish deboning the chicken. What's more, we forgot about the taco shells warming in the oven until several of them caught fire and the smoke detector went off, which sent the dog off into a frenzy of howls. Perhaps he thought if he howled loud enough we wouldn't notice he'd stolen the cheese of the counter, eaten half and pulverised the other half. The only cheese left in the apartment was romano. Also, the sour cream was off, the lettuce wilted, and the tomatoes squooshy.
And so once the smoke had cleared and my eyeball had oozed itself back into its socket, we were left with splitnery, blackened, tomato-sogged tacos that left us gasping for air due the hot jerk chicken and begging for water due to the tangy romano cheese. One more brilliant idea foiled by the indignity of reality. Martha would have just laughed and talked about, while still in prison, all the delicious and attractive nibbles she had made with just flour, water, prison rations and a little bit the creative spirit.
