fandomhigh | Home Ec 10, Period 4, 3/16

"This week," Steve said, "we'll be sauteing and pan frying. These two are very similar, and some people even use them interchangeably. Others argue that the amount of oil used, or something like that, makes them different. You can make up your own minds; I won't tell you how to think. Both methods involve cooking food in a shallow pan in a smallish amount of oil. For a saute, a distinctive 'flipping' motion is traditionally used." Steve took hold of the handle of a panful of sliced mushrooms and demonstrated this motion, while ~~handwavily~~ explaining how to do it. Oooh. Ahhh. "If you don't feel up to this, please do not attempt it, as you'll make a giant mess you'll just have to clean up. Instead, you can just stir with a spatula and I won't tell anyone. For pan frying, you typically cook something on one side, then turn it over and cook it on the other.

"So, now you're going to saute mushrooms--after you slice them up, of course--and pan-fry some pork chops. Make sure your pork is done all the way through before you eat it, or you could get food poisoning, and I'd hate to explain how I let that happen to your parents. Pork is done at 160 degrees Fahrenheit. I've provided thermometers at your duty stations. Please don't hesitate to use them."

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"Oh, not too bad," Karla ~~LIED LIKE A LYING THING~~ said with naive hope. "I'm used to chopping up herbs and things and Mr. Rogers didn't make it seem all that hard."

Their poor class.

"Wanna pair up?"

At least there were no pine nuts involved?

"He also didn't make that washing by hand stuff look hard," Tony grumbled. THEY HAD MACHINES FOR A REASON. "As long as you're okay with me having no clue how to do this kind of stuff."

Yes, Karla. You were the one with the cooking knowledge here. Bask in that. Bask in it.

Oh, she did. She so did.

And pine nuts were always an option.

"Okay, then," she said, unable to stop herself from grinning. She had cooking seniority! "You should wash the mushrooms. And maybe the pork chops, too." Everything needed to be washed when they were cooking, right? "Rinse them really well to get the soap off. I'll add the oil to the pans."

Filling the pan halfway with oil. That shouldn't be too much.

"Wash the food," Tony repeated. "I can manage that."

See, no explosions here, Steve. But those poor mushrooms would never survive.

Steve had been hoping the students would learn from paying attention to the lectures, and by example, but it was becoming rapidly clear that was not the case at this particular work station. Time for him to step in, before someone applied soap to raw meat. And those poor mushrooms. "Hey, guys, what are we doing here?" he asked. "Karla, that might be a tad too much oil." Like a couple of cups.

Karla glanced up, feeling obscurely guilty. "Cooking?" she offered. "Really? Are you sure?"

She gave the pan a dubious glance. "I wasn't gonna flip it?"

Now that Steve was here, anyway.

"We need to pour off some--" by which he meant almost all "--of that oil," Steve said, taking the pan away to do so and returning it with a much-reduced amount. "Remember, we're pan frying, not deep frying. That has too much fire potential for this class.

"And, Tony, let me show you how to clean those mushrooms. See, what you do is, you take a clean kitchen towel and dampen it, and just wipe the cap off, so they don't get waterlogged. And, uh. And no soap on the food."

"Mushrooms get waterlogged?" WHERE WAS ALTON BROWN TO EXPLAIN THIS?

"And how do you know they're clean if you can't use soap?"

You didn't just rinse forks off with a towel and called it good.

"Soap isn't for things you're going to eat," Steve explained. "Your food would taste like soap. They're going in a hot pan, that will kill any surface germs the soap would get to anyway."

Though Steve had missed her entirely, he was of the Julia Child school of thought: if it survived his hot oven, it deserved to make him sick. Not that he could get food poisoning, but that was beside the point. Other people could.

"And, yes," Steve told Tony. "Mushrooms are sort of constructed like sponges; they'll soak the water right up and the texture gets bad." THE PLAYER WAS TOO LAZY TO LOOK UP THE CLIP, THAT'S WHERE.

Also Alton Brown subscribes to the theory that it's fine to rinse them briefly, which is one of the few points we disagree on.

It was a Southern show down. OH SNAP.

"Huh." Tony looked at the mushroom more closely. "Maybe biology is worth learning after all..."

Home Ec 10, Period 4, 3/16

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