The Mutton Gourmet

This blog is because I know ... I know that you've been sitting there just thinking, "I wonder how much a sheep CJ is?" Well, wonder no more. Here's a true story that should give you a clear indication of my level of ability to blindly follow orders.


For the past year, my mother has been sending me these frozen gourment meals from Home Bistro. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm 36, big as a house, and somehow she still thinks I'm not eating? I don't know. Maybe she figures that food's the only safe present to give me. Anyway, it's her money to do with as she pleases, and they taste pretty good if a little bland to my Indian/Mexican food pallette.

They're also pretty easy to prepare. You basically just boil a pot of water and you're set. The courses come frozen in individual packages - meat/fish, vegetables, rice/pasta, sauce. You throw the packages in the boiling water, turn the pot down to simmer for usually 11 minutes ("You know the pot is simmering when you can see small bubbles coming up from the bottom."), serve and it's done. It's the perfect thing for when you come back home from rehearsal, you haven't eaten dinner, it's late, you're hungry, and you're too tired to want to cook something.

The only tricky part comes when serving. The meat/fish and vegetable courses usually have an instruction informing you that there is a liquid in the pouch and that you need to drain the liquid out before removing the food. To drain the liquid, you should snip a tiny whole in the corner of the pouch and squeeze out the liquid before cutting the pouch further and serving whatever is in there.


Now, it is vitally important (so says the instructions) that you squeeze out all of the liquid in the pouch before serving the course within. They make such a big deal about this, that it has kind of freaked me out. I mean, they never tell you what the liquid is, and my imagination has started running. Is it some kind of toxic accelerant they put in the package to help things cook such that trace amounts are fine but the full amount is deadly? What? What is it? And as time has gone on, the warning sounds more and more ominous to me -- "Whatever you do - Whatever you do - for God's sake! Make sure you drain out all the liquid in the pouch! There was this one guy in Scranton that failed to drain out all the liquid ... horrible ... horrible!"

So I've been obsessively draining this liquid, and it's no easy task the way they've laid it out. If you cut the hole too large then a bean or a shrimp or whatever pops out and falls into the sink, either into the pile of rotting vegetable matter that's been decomposing in the drain for the last week or into the puddle of highly toxic accelerant that you're getting rid of. If you cut the hole too small, you don't get all the liquid out. Either way, you're handling the pouch, which has just simmmered for 11 minutes ("You know the pot is simmering when you can see small bubbles coming up from the bottom.") and thus it's hot. So usually, I wrap it in a dish towel in order to be able to hold the pouch and manipulate it, but I have to make sure no boiling hot, poison accelerant gets on the towel ... you get the picture. But like I said, the meals aren't bad and they're so convenient, right?

So anyway, a couple of nights ago I'm fixing one up (I think it was a shrimp thing with vodka sauce.) when I get to my usual dance with the Pouch of Poison. I've got the snip (a little too big - I'm wrestling to keep a wayward green bean from escaping); I've got the dish towel; I'm crushing the life out of the vegetables to make sure every last drop of the evil mystery liquid is gone. And at that point - mind you, this has been going on for a year - at that point I think to myself for the first time, "Man, this is a pain! Wouldn't it be great if there were like, some kind of container that I could just pour this stuff into where the vegetables would stay and the liquid could run off?" And then, of course, it hit me ... that, in the collection of kitchen micellaney, there maybe was such a device, say like ... a collander!!


But wait! My next thought was - I swear to you - "Nah! If it was okay to use a collander, surely they would've said in the instructions."

Baaaa!