Knife Points and Charmin Rolls

Sitting on a friend's toilet the other day, it hit me that I have two categories of behavior when it comes to believing that there is a certain way things must be done. The first category is activities which I choose to do one way, and firmly believe my way is correct, but will give you the respect and benefit of the doubt of not challenging your way of doing it. The second category is activities which I feel must always be done one way only and for which some OCD insistence tendencies emerge.

An example in the first category is loading the dishwasher. Bob would argue strongly that I put dish placement in the second category of obsessive rigidity, but that's only when it comes to loading our dishwasher. When I am helping to do the dishes in someone else's home, I respect the dishwasher style that they employ. I think glass racks are for glasses only (and any plastic containers or lids, as their instructions always clearly state "top rack only") and bowls are more closely aligned with plates, but if I am helping clean up at your house and you choose to mingle cups and bowls, I will follow your lead. I won't even judge you for it. I also think silverware should be placed with the handle pointing up for reasons of safety, cleanliness, and sanitation. Safety because if the sharp knife point is face-down, you don't risk grazing yourself as you hurry through loading to get to the t.v. in time for tipoff; Cleanliness because a dishwasher spraying from the bottom will hit the food-covered tips with the most force when the functional ends are closest; and Sanitation because you can move the clean silverware from the washer to the drawer by the handles without rubbing your potentially grubby fingers all over the eating ends. All of these clearly elucidated arguments aside, if your silverware has the spoon slopes and fork tines reaching for the sky, I will dangerously place the knife tip in the same direction.

In my own home, I believe that the glass rack only functions at it's highest potential if you don't sacrifice space to a prong-hogging bowl. The bottom rack can be piled and leaning chaos, but the top rack has evenly spaced rows for a reason. I doubt that Bob will ever understand why I care so much, and I doubt I could ever explain it, but nothing in the way we share space can throw me into a fit of "this is never going to work" anger more than when he throws a glass into the middle of the top rack, teetering on a random prong. We have had actual arguments about whether the prongs are there to divide sections for you, making the best option placing the glasses securely between the prongs in even rows (my view) or whether the prongs are there to have a glass balanced upon them (his obviously erroneous view). When it was clear that he would not agree with my logic of the security and efficient space usage with my approach, I turned to pleading and begged him that as this issue clearly matters to me far more than to him, could he just do it my way?

For the most part, he does, and it has become the single biggest indicator of how far our living-together relationship has come in the last year and a half. When the glasses are placed evenly in rows in the dishwasher, not sloppily dangling haphazardly from prongs, I believe that we have found a balance, that he respects the work I do in the kitchen, that our lives can progress together in an organized home. But when I find a dangler, a leaner, or - god forbid it or my head will explode - a glass placed so carelessly that it has fallen completely on it's side, every insecurity about our loving survival rushes to the surface.

I realize it is sounding more and more like I should have been medicated years ago. Don't worry, I am careful to self-medicate daily and I will save you all from the pain I could share here about the chaos wine glasses cause if you are inclined (wrongly, from my point of view) to put them in the dishwasher. Despite Bob's exclusion, for the most part I can respect that other people load their dishwashers differently. What I can't abide, what I don't understand, what my anxious fingers can barely stop themselves from reaching out and fixing, is a toilet paper roll loaded the wrong way.

As these issues of right and wrong seem harder for others to see as clearly as I do, I will let you know that the wrong way to load a roll of toilet paper is with the free end hanging from behind the roll. The right way to load a roll of toilet paper is with the free end hanging on top of the roll, facing the wiper, nose-blower, or mischievous cat. Picture a hotel bathroom that tries to wow you with cleanliness and freshness by folding the tip into a neat triangle (and try to ignore that this shape means the person who was just cleaning the toilet then manhandled the bit of paper that you will soon be touching). Fine hotels and even most shitty motels recognize and illustrate the right way to load a toilet paper roll.

I feel the benefits of the right way are obvious: if the paper is loaded the wrong way, you can't see where the end is hanging. And if you start rolling the tube towards you, you could potentially miss the end as it passes by. When the paper is loaded the wrong way, you could spin the roll around a dozen times and the end wouldn't get any longer. But when the paper is loaded the right way, and you spin it towards you, the end will present itself and get longer and longer as you spin. The end is closer to you, offering itself with friendliness to your service, instead of lurking in the back against the wall or cabinet, hiding from your needs.

Here my obsessiveness reaches out of my own home. If I know you well and think you will love me anyway or if you are someone I know so little I don't care what you think of me, I will correct your toilet paper roll. If it is clear the roll was changed right before me and the homeowner likely doesn't know yet which way it is facing or if it was changed by a guest, I will fix it. Even though I hate those stupid spring-loaded contraptions and know I am risking encountering the faulty one where the spring pops out and the holder scatters in parts across the floor, I will still feel the strongest need to correct your roll's direction. I know it's invasive and rude and slightly crazy, but I guess I approach it like my plea to Bob to just do it my way because I clearly care more. If you care so little about your toilet paper access that you load it the wrong way, than you clearly can't care enough about it to mind if I turn it around. I find it hard to believe that anyone strongly feels it must be loaded backwards and prefers it that way. I assume anyone whose paper is loaded the wrong way is a victim of lazy chance.

And I now arrive at my second product endorsement of this blog: please explore the new world of toilet paper holders. The one single item that makes me the happiest in the entirety of our remodeled bathroom is the spring-less toilet paper holder. Instead of that squeezed plastic tube between two cruddy porcelain ends, our paper holder is a U-shaped curved bar. You simply slide the roll on and off the open end. The whole process can be done with one hand, an amazing revolution in toilet paper holder technology. I find this advancement so critical that I once gave the 21st-Century holder as a birthday gift to a friend mired in bathroom renovations. I daresay it was one of the most beautifully functional gifts I have ever wrapped.

I think it's clear that it's approaching medication time and thankfully a bottle of Chianti is already open. I am sorry to those of you who have been unsuspecting victims of my invasive toilet paper handling. I'm just trying to make the world a better place.

The Perplexities of Naked Chicken

I called my mom tonight, as I sometimes do in the throes of a chaotic cooking attempt. She knows the basics of how to cook most anything in that instinctual way that someone who has spent thirty years feeding a family develops. I still look everything up - how long, what temperature, how do I know it's ripe? There's no way I could pick out a cantaloupe at the store, but she does it by smell. She knows how much meat to buy for ten people, whereas I have to step away from the meat counter and overthink a calculation that often ends up in way too much or slightly too little. I glance at a recipe a dozen times to check temperatures and cook times, but with my mom, everytime my dad answers her that whatever he just put on the grill will take "about ten minutes", she knows which meats will really show up at the table in fifteen. Along with my own mom, it is probably an unsung trait of mothers everywhere that she is the one person in the house that everyone goes to to ask "How long should I heat this in the microwave?".

I think I took her off guard with the intro to my question tonight, when I told her "I'm always perplexed by the naked chicken." But I am. Tonight was the third time I worked with a whole chicken and couldn't for the life of me figure out which end goes up. I've looked it up in the past, and was reminded again tonight that my Betty Crocker cookbook is disappointing in it's lack of an anatomical poultry illustration. There's one for beef - each part of the cow carved into little steaks with the label of what cut they are. Apparently no one needs this detailed guide for the chicken, other than me.

Having to ask for help on the phone, I described the chicken to my mother the way you would give directions: "If you're on the street, looking at the entrance to the mall, Old Navy is to the left". I described the chicken as if the poor bird wasn't currently beheaded and featherless on my counter: "So if the chicken is walking around like a chicken, with his little legs under him and his wings on his sides, is the breast the part that's on his back, or what's under him facing the ground?" My mom lovingly ignored the ridiculousness of my question and answered with the respect all reference librarians give to finding the correct answer, and let me know that the breast was what I was describing as the chicken's back. She tried to help me further by getting me to picture the Thanksgiving turkey, but I lamely had to admit that while the turkey seems obvious, this little roaster chicken's proportions didn't make a top and bottom obvious to me. It's not surprising I couldn't figure out top and bottom, since I mixed up front and back as well when I grabbed onto the neck bone and tugged, thinking I was pulling on the giblets that were actually stuffed in the other end.

I thanked my mom for her help, knowing she was going to get off the phone and turn to her husband to share something along the lines of "Our brilliant daughter just called because she can't figure out which side of the chicken goes up", inviting my dad to join her in disbelief of how I couldn't know that. Chicken anatomy aside, I felt pretty confident about my recipe endeavor tonight. Knowing now, at least, not to try to stuff the neck bone, I filled the chicken with lemon, garlic, rosemary and thyme, mentally thanking Bob's old chef roommate for planting all of these great herbs. The chicken went in a pot on top of some Dutch potatoes, a sliced onion (a rarity for me, being an onion hater), and a carrot.

An hour and a half later, the chicken was gorgeous. I sent a cell phone photo with pride to family members, shouting "Roast Chicken!!", exuberantly and unabashedly typing two exclamation points in the text portion of the message. I picked up a sharp knife, cut into the golden roasted skin, and my heart sank. It was pink. I got a little further and was dismayed that it wasn't just pink, it was brown. I had a disgusting, rotten, undercooked chicken.

And then I realized I had cooked the damn thing upside down.

What I was cutting into was not the white expanse of breastmeat, but the multi-hued dark meat of the thigh. I sighed and flipped the bird over, rolling the beautiful buttery-golden and crispy skin into the collected liquid on the platter and exposing the flacid, soggy, pale-as-if-raw skin hanging over the breast. Before I cut into this unseasoned sheet of disappointment, I made Bob come in and look at the chicken's beautiful backside, sent back into the darkness in the name of traditional carvery.

One would think this gaffe means I will definitely get it right next time, with such a vivid picture of the wrong way, but I turned the wrong way down the same street dozens of times before figuring out how to get to the taco place where we eat at least once a month. I fear that "chicken anatomy" may permenantly sit next to "sense of direction" on the list of my weaknesses.

It was, however, a deliciously tasty bird.