Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

Not very haute; all kinds of happy.

Last week at work, I ate shitty mall food court Chinese food for lunch. I relished every bite of it. As I walked in the room with that Styrofoam container, several of my coworkers looked on incredulously. They were surprised that I would deign to eat from such a place. I was surprised at their surprise. They called me a food snob. They were being good-natured about it, and I suppose I can see where they were coming from, but it rankled a bit.

It rankled because my attitudes about food have always been about happiness, pleasure, excitement and sharing. It rankled because I've spent a lot of time talking about food with my coworkers, sharing restaurant recommendations and recipes, running the gamut from authentic Japanese Omakase in Ohio, to how to replicate Chik-fil-A sauce. I've cooked for them out of The French Laundry and Alinea Cookbooks, but I've also made them many of the simple, staple meals of my youth, like sausage and sauerkraut. It rankled because I don't think of myself as a snob.

The comment did get me thinking about my history with food, and about how my attitudes have changed over time, shaped by my upbringing and my adult life in equal measure. Through a childhood with three brothers and not a lot of money, to my first few years as a married adult and not a lot of money, thrift has always informed my cooking and eating habits. The ways in which that manifests itself have shifted over time and with changing means, but I'm still the guy who takes every scrap of leftovers (even from fancy restaurants) and who uses every scrap of everything in some way. Don't throw out that 1/4 cup of leftover rice, I'll use that in something!

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Ceviche is always best when served on a salt puck.

Welcome back to the weekly roundup here at Eating Our Words, where there can never be enough varieties of the Newton. We're working on a Boston Cream Pie Newton that should be ready before the end of the year, assuming we can get our taste testers to stop coughing up blood.

Fish envelopes! We chose to start out the week with them. Next week: fish stamps. We're trying to make things as nightmarish for the post office as possible.

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What the holy hell, is that a fresh vegetable? Who am I and what have I done with the Shameless Chef?

I gotta be honest with you, the column almost didn't happen today. I think I came down with something, because I slept about 20 hours yesterday. No lie, I passed out around 5:30 p.m., woke up about a half hour past midnight, then passed out again around 4:30 a.m. and woke up again not long after 10 this morning. My energy is at an all-time low and I'm constantly drowsy. I've tried to talk to some doctors, but whenever the subject of my dietary habits comes up they just start sobbing uncontrollably and won't quit until I hang up. I mean, I assume they quit when I hang up. Huh. Jeez, for all I know, the town's still full of bitterly weeping health professionals.

Anyway, I was lounging around listlessly trying to conserve those vital calories, watching horrible, moronic television shows that are basically junk-food for my brain, when I finally got hungry. I hadn't eaten anything since lunchtime yesterday, so I started raiding my cupboards. Shit was pitifully bare, folks. All I really had were some miscellaneous cans and some chips. For the first time in almost two days, however, I was able to string a couple of thoughts together and remember I had most, if not all, of the ingredients for my Aunt Cathy's do-it-yourself salsa. I dug out the recipe and sleepily got to work.

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Can you tell I had my camera on the wrong setting? Hahahahahaha, professionalism.

While hunting through some old family recipes looking for inspiration, I came across a yellowed, stained note card with the recipe for something called "Baptist Cookies," and I was intrigued. Obvious jokes aside ("Do they contain real Baptists?"), I wondered what the hell a Baptist cookie was, never having heard of such a thing. Upon reading the recipe, I discovered that they are simply cookies you can make in a skillet. Cookies. In a skillet. Hell to the yes, people.

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I love pre-diced ham. I'm a busy guy, I can't be using and then washing off knives all day.

You can't mention the concept of breakfast without someone near you piping up that it's the most important meal of the day. Well if it's so damn important, how come I sleep straight through it 95% of the time, Mr. Smarty Pants? And I happen to be in perfect health, if you don't count the bad knees, iffy ankles, respiratory problems after more than two flights of stairs, bouts of blurry kaleidoscopic vision, and occasional numbness on the entire left side of my body.

Still, every now and then, for one reason or another, I am forced to leave my soft, comfy bed before noon, and when that happens, I like a nice, hearty meal to give me the energy I need to make it through the hour and a half before I take an early lunch. I also like a meal that's simple, cooks up quickly, and is customizable to suit my mood. And starches. I do like me some starches.

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Pictured: NUTRITION

Have you ever slouched out of bed around 1:30 in the afternoon, grunting and snorting, and staggered to the kitchen, opened up a can of ravioli for breakfast, and tossed it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, only to realize "Damn. This ravioli just isn't ravioli-y enough"? No? Liar.

Yes, I'm a big fan of canned ravioli, especially on those days when my body craves an absolutely unbelievable amount of sodium, but sometimes it feels like something's missing. Sometimes it feels like the ravioli itself is just a good start towards something better, something grander, something... that could fit in a casserole dish. If you're surprised, you either just started reading this column or are what Jethro Tull and I like to call "Thick as a Brick."

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More dishes need bread crumbs in them. Someone with some kind of cooking column should make a note of that.

Everybody knows Salisbury steak isn't too difficult to make, yet in the Shameless Chef family, we feel compelled to make things as simple as possible. This is because we're efficient to a fault. Of course, some people mistakenly label this sort of extreme efficiency as "laziness," but what the hell do they know? Have you ever been with someone who was obsessively hunting down the "right" spice for some kind of ridiculously complicated recipe that, when you finally tried it, didn't really taste all that special? Didn't you want to slap them? Don't ever get sucked into that lifestyle. Here's a fun tip: When they finally serve you their "masterpiece," immediately reach for the saltshaker and apply it liberally, without even trying the food. Watching someone trying to hold back tears has rarely been so hilarious.

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Hey look, it's pasta, but it's not shells! Aren't you proud of me?

Here's a recipe I made up off the top of my head that isn't complicated, isn't too bad for you, and has a grand total of four ingredients (five if you count water, which you would only do if you were a dick). After running it through a focus group, I settled on the moniker "Cousin Sarah's Chicken Pasta," because the poll questions showed it brought to mind a familiar, down-home feel in the customer's mind.

Okay, now I'm being told that I did not invent this recipe, I do in fact have a cousin Sarah, it is in fact her recipe, and her father, my uncle, used to visit us twice a month and took us out to eat at our local Chinese buffet every time. Huh. Well, let that be a lesson, kids: Don't self-medicate during those high school years.

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When you see things like this every week, how can you not have questions?

You wouldn't think a column as simple, straightforward and, let's be honest, stupid as mine would get a whole lot of questions, but you'd be wrong. In the - holy hell - almost a year I've been doing this, I've been asked the same questions quite a bit, so I thought it was about time to round 'em all up in one place so I can just send people there. Some call it "laziness," I call it "efficiency." Plus for the life of me, I couldn't think of anything to cook today, and my editor was threatening to make a meat smoothie out of my gizzard. And she was right to.

Q: Are you fucking serious?

A: Yep, that and the following question are far and away the ones I get asked the most. The answer is: uh, sort of? All the recipes are real. I've really made them, and I've really enjoyed the results (some more than others). However, we should all by now be well aware that this column is primarily an exercise in humor. Not to mention, when it started out it was a great way to piss off all the snooty foodie snobs who know how to make the perfect shallot reduction to go with the paté in their chicken galantine, but who wouldn't know a joke if it took that chicken galantine out of the oven and made tender love to it on the dining table until their dinner guests got the hint and went home. So the short answer is: Yes, I take the actual cooking part of it seriously enough for the recipes to work, but everything else is pretty fast and loose.

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Try not to eat all the individual components before you have a chance to combine them.

Ah, summer in Houston. When the dashboards melt, ants cook on the sidewalk, and a young man's ballsack takes on the consistency of Turkish taffy. When the voices in the heads of serial killers mainly say things like "No killing tonight, it's too hot for that bullshit. Stay in and have some lemonade." When your irritating friends once again pipe up with facts about how icy treats can actually make you hotter instead of cooling you off and once again you grit your teeth and put off their well-deserved vicious beating for another year. When the local armored attack mosquitoes steal your deep woods mosquito spray so they can put it on their blood tacos because Texas mosquitoes loooove them some Tex Mex. I guess I'm saying summer in Houston fucking sucks. Or at least it did until you clicked on this article.

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