Return to the Merge Left Lane

Amazon, which has survived all these years mainly because of me, recently decided I deserved some kind of prize for having stocked a home library worthy of a small country's national archives. I picked a year's subscription to "Bon Appetit".

The recipes looked delicious beyond description, but as I read them, I noticed that they seemed somewhat complicated. Not challenging in a technical sense, but kind of time-consuming with lots and lots of steps. Stuff like "After grinding the slivered almonds in a mini-food processor, place the white clothes in a pile and place all other clothes back in the hamper. Place clothes in washing machine. Beat two thousand egg whites until soft peaks form, and fold in the flour. Be sure to recover the tennis shoe under the guest room bed but leave the lint there. You can rip out the carpet later and install wood floors. For the filling, mix the egg whites with a cup of sugar, vanilla, cardomom, and nine pints of cream so heavy it won't flow out of the carton if you turn it upside down. Make your appointment for having stints placed in your major arteries. Bake in a bunt pan at 350° for 40 minutes or until you locate a fire extinguisher to put out the fire in the dryer caused by the fuzz you forgot to remove from the filter. Place a cone-shaped hat on your head and cool cake by inverting it, upside down, over the cone. Refer to next six pages for the recipe for the caramel topping."

The recipes all seemed so involved, until I found one for a chicken pie from Morroco. The recipe was actually printed on a single page of the magazine, and the only challenge was working with philo dough. That was kind of daunting. I'd worked with it before--okay, okay, the work was cramming it into the trash after I had left it in the open air for 30 seconds and it dried out so badly that it cracked and fell into several hundred pieces.

The package instructions were scary too. "Make sure you have all your ingredients in place and ready to go before you even think about opening this package." It sounded like a kind of explosive device.

Nevertheless, I forged ahead. I had the chicken filling all made, the melted butter ready to slap onto the philo layers, plastic sheeting ready to fling over the dough, and a humid, woolen king-sized blanket ready to place on top of the sheeting.

Once I got the dough out of the package, I felt like someone trying to organize an orderly military retreat before the pin-less grenade in my hands went off. I slathered butter, working feverishly with the paper-thin philo layers, dashing back and forth from dough to baking dish like someone trying to learn flamenco dancing in one simple lesson. I even took ten seconds, recklessly, to wrap a dishtowel around my forehead so I wouldn't sweat into the chicken pie. After having done all this and feeling that all was right in the world, I discovered that I had missed a step or two somehow, the part about playing "La Cucaracha" on a xylophone while the tumeric cooked with the eleven large onions, and it seems I also had omitted writing an essay between layers nine and ten of the philo dough on the difference between applewood-smoked ham and Canadian bacon.

What the heck. It's time to bake the thing. In it goes as is. The instructions say to make slits in your oven to make sure the steam can escape, but I'm made of sterner stuff than that. I don't care if the damned oven blows up.