How to Make $1 Million - Books

Here's hopefully the first in a long series where I give you fantastic ideas that make you money, and then you give me some of that money because I came up with it and am just too lazy to follow through on any of them.


It occurred to me today that you can write a profitable genre-mystery by appending the word "Murder" to any pre-existing book title. No? Anything. Either it's descriptive of the event or just sounds awesome on its face:

• "The Iliad Murder"

• "The Jewish Mother Cookbook Murder"

• What to Expect When You're Expecting … Murder"

Write a long, winding tale of tragedy and political assassination; a funny yet self-effacing death at a high-society kitchen; a story of a pregnant mother/former double agent trying to uncover the whereabouts of her captured baby-daddy/ex-partner/traitorous enemy.

Then make the royalty checks payable to Dave.

On Crockpots

So I gotta hop on this "crockpot" thing. It's wizardry, right? A magic cauldron?

Listen, you're telling me I put some meat, veggies, and delicious spices into a deceptively simple-looking heat box along with some water before I leave for work, and when I get home someone has mysteriously made me a delicious dinner?

Sorcery!

I know about four spells from Harry Potter—one of them forbidden—but accio soup was not one of them.

Of Culinary Literacy

So this is a real book, a mystery, as the cover seems to show, and while I have no idea what it is about, I can only surmise that it is wonderful, witty, and possibly about a stuck-up pastry chef who is forced to move in with her sister and brother-in-law after an ill-conceived series of liaisons with younger sous-chefs, leaving her destitute and friendless, only to be physically and sexually abused by her callous in-law, who at some point I'm guessing runs out into the rainy night and to the face of an apartment complex shouts, "FONDANT! FONDAAAAAAANT!!"

How to Not Light A Gas Grill

Here's a fun story from last weekend.

You know how a group of men and women fully versed in the arts of cooking and eating meat can usually start up a device for the cooking part of that process? Well it doesn't work so well on an unfamiliar grill. It happened on Jersey Shore; they set charcoal aflame in a gas grill. Nearly blew up the house.

This go around? Well, there was a time my dad burned off both his eyebrows using too much starter fluid, so let's just say I'm still the safer grill master at this age. Yes, I didn't quite burn off any hair, but my face felt the heat and I certainly had to check that I kept my sweet, trans-eyebrow Bong Villain scar.

For reference, this is what a gas grill's knob layout generally looks like:

You can adjust the flow of gas to adjust flame height and heat. It's very simple. The Ignition is also very clearly marked by a big scary red button. Like all things that explode.

The trick is, the ignition won't actually light unless the one starting burner (usually farthest away from you for obvious reasons) is turned to it's highest setting, marked by this little guy:

Little lightning bolts on electrically-sparked gas tanks. It's how Jaws ended, I think.

Here's the important bit:

When three of you are fidgeting with the burner knobs for a solid five minutes trying to get the lighter working, it's best to let the airspace above the grill air out a bit before cranking the gas up and igniting it all. Otherwise you get kind of a small Hindenburg event. Nothing major, but kind of yeah, a pretty decent sized fireball.

You also really scare the lady of the house, whose dad usually does all the grilling.

Being A 'Foodie' in a Roomful of Drinkers Is Like Rooting for the Away Team

There's a whole bunch of drunk dudes sitting around. Some have been drinking at home, some have been out, but suddenly everyone is together and one guy makes himself some mac & cheese.

Now it's a food free-for-all.

Who can find the most delicious consumable first? Who can find just what they want?

What's that? Dave has a box of leftover fillet mignon and mushroom Beef Wellington bites in the fridge? Really? Well, I suppose those will sustain us through further imbibing.

It's good you say?


Man, some days I get sad all my friends love drinking more than eating. Then I remember it's okay that I drink like a tiny, frail old lady, because I nearly need a change of pants every time I get to make myself dinner.

All the ladies love eating with Dave.

On Culinary Greatness

Last night I went all-out on a dinner. It took me like 2 hours, but I made this:

That would be mini beef Wellington pastries (named after the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo), filled with a Crimini mushroom and shallot mixture, and a cucumber-tomato salad with Italian dressing and Gorgonzola cheese.

And a Pepsi. Throwback. With lime.

Check out that pastry puff.

That is a 1 inch cube of tender, seasoned, seared filet mignon–a beef tenderloin–and mushrooms and chopped shallot cooked in the beef's own natural juices, baked up inside a thin, flaky crust. (Oh, and about two dozen extra cubes of beef because the recipe seriously underestimated the need for pastry dough.)

I popped one in the microwave a few hours later and it was still amazing. Someone should fricking market this. Wrap these up in a box or something.

Ah fuck. Is that what those things were supposed to be? No. No, I can't accept that. What I made was delicious and classy! It's the choicest, most buttery beef and delicious mushroom. I don't even like mushrooms and this was amazing. I mean, if I loaded it up with preservatives and decreased ingredient quality until it was affordable to the common NASCAR fan … shit.

I just created gourmet Hot Pockets. At least I didn't burn the roof of my mouth.

Hope I poop soon, though.…Hot pockeeeeeet….

On Snow Days

I had had a plan for yesterday, or rather, I had a plan for a good snow day activity and I just wasn't in the mood for it yesterday. Perhaps if I elaborate you'll understand why.

A while back I came across a recipe for cookies. As you can see, part of that recipe includes functionally prepared cookies. No, it's not some trick, that's a recipe for a chocolate chip cookies with a prefabricated cookie inside. It's a cookie with a delicious other cookie center. Marvelous.

And yet, I just wasn't prepared. I had things to do, people to see, conversations to be had and materials to read. Honestly, I just wasn't in the cookie baking mood. Really, up until this point in my life, I never imagined there was such a thing.

Of course, the last time I ate a dessert that had an Oreo on the inside, I didn't poop for four days, so maybe that had something to do with it.

On Batter Blasters

Hey, kids! What's the new culinary sensation that's sweeping the nation and sounds suspiciously like it was named after a porn star's junk?!

That's right! It's "Batter Blaster!"

Yup, that's the Cheeze-Whiz equivalent of pancakes, alright. However, it's also organic, so there's that, I guess.

I- No. You know what? This sounds hilarious. Hilarious and delicious. I want it. I want to eat this. I want to go to the supermarket trolling for Batter Blasters and I want to take it home when no one is around to see us, and I want to do it right in the kitchen and have batter blaster go into my mouth. I mean cook it first, obviously, but I want to taste blasted batter.

And if it could leave out the back door so the neighbor's don't see, that'd be great too.

On Expanding Your Horizons

I am a finicky eater; I will make no qualms about that. However, as a child I was somewhat more horrible in this regard. (To be fair, I've learned my throat hole was more than likely obstructed by unreasonably oversized tonsils, but this is somewhat beside the point.)

When my mother cooked me peas and carrots, she would have to pick out the "undesirables," peas which were wrinkly and not perfectly spherical, carrots not perfectly cubed. Were I to find one vegetable bit not to my liking, I would gingerly, between thumb and forefinger like deceased rodent, remove the offending party to the opposite side of my plate. I apologize to my mother wholeheartedly.

Some time around my third birthday I think, my mother finally gave up. It dawned on her that I did not enjoy her elaborately prepared meals, nor did she enjoy in any way cooking them. Or cooking in general. My mom does not like cooking. Which is fine. She's not great at it. (Again, I apologize wholeheartedly.)

I now have a few simple rules for what I will not willingly consume:

• no seafood other than canned tuna smothered in mayonnaise
  
• no peppers, onions or mushrooms
• nothing that still looks like it did when it was alive

Also no gross crap like bull testicles or tripe, but that rarely comes up in everyday meal planning.

I've actually found I have a bit of a knack for cooking. Oddly, I also enjoy it. I'm willing to experiment more with flavors and processes. This has carried over into my eating habits out in the wild. The trouble remains, I am not inclined to try something new at any time I am ravenously hungry or at a location where I have an established favorite dish. I become unwilling to risk a new delight on the possibility it may turn out to be awful and I have wasted money and remain hungry.

But, man, on special occasions I'll stuff pretty much anything down my gullet. A couple weeks ago some producer dude from L.A. bought us all appetizers to use as props (no one actually eats on television) and I chomped a fried chicken finger in between takes. It was not chicken. Upon close examination, it was a fried shrimp. A very flat shrimp.

I was quite disturbed. This violated not one, but two of my no-go food rules, seafood and technically the "still looks alive" thing, as shrimp–minus the breading–are this rule's greatest offenders one side of a suckling pig.

Good thing freeze-dried fried shrimp come so bland and tasteless I didn't have an opportunity to freak out. Just chew, swallow and switch back to a more reasonable food. Like a fried pickle.

This is my default cooking image. You'd not be surprised how many more hits it gets me.

On Fruit

This is why we can't have nice things.



Seriously, guys? Seriously?

We didn't have enough fucked up fruits and plants and shit lining our grocery store shelves already, we had to go and genetically splice strawberries with pineapples?

It's a strawberry. It's already delicious. You don't need to forcibly crossbreed it with a pineapple, admittedly already another delicious fruit, if not one with a somewhat jaded past. (I can't seem to find it, but I still feel at some point I've covered the history of the pineapple. Quick refresher: pine cones were called pineapples because they hung in pine trees like fruit. Then someone discovered a fruit, called in a pine-y apple and the two were called the same thing until some other guy said, "This is retarded. Let's just call the one that's actually a fruit an apple. The other one can be a cone or some shit.")

ANYWAY.

The point is we really didn't need this. Yeah, it sounds delicious and yeah, I'd love to get my hands on one and am willing to pay an exorbitant fee for it, but, guys. Guys. Really? Did we really need to make a bizarro-strawberry that tastes like a pineapple? It doesn't even taste like a combination of the fruits, which is an absolutely delicious grouping of flavors! It's just a very tiny pineapple with less peeling involved. (Which actually sounds wonderful. Maybe it's a fruit of convenience. You know, like those dog purses. Just slice up a few of these and a few real strawberries and voila, pretty fruit salad.)

Still, I really didn't need to deal with this in my life right now. You'd think it wouldn't affect me, but this is just one more act of humanity playing God that I'll need to justify in my world view.


And I mean I already feel like enough of an asshole when I open my fridge and put tomatoes into the little drawer marked "VEGETABLES" instead of the one that says "FRUIT."

12 Reasons to Have A Valentine That Are Not Romantic

Possible 2010 Valentine Card. It's things like this that keep me from associating with normal people.

1. If I'm hungry for chocolate I don't want the guy at the checkout counter eying me suspiciously.
   
   
2. There are a bunch of romantic comedies I've been meaning to rent but I'd feel weird watching them by myself.
   
   
3. My other friends are too cheap to go out to Applebees as often as I'd like.
   
   
4. When I don't receive any cards this year it'll be because I'm considered "off limits," not "an asshole."
   
   
5. I like making chicken cordon bleu, but it's always been a problem that chicken breasts are frozen in packages of two.
   
   
6. Conversations about how it's a holiday manufactured by greedy, soulless corporations will no longer come off as sounding lonely or spiteful.
   
   
7. If someone were to spend, say, $20 on something I've wanted, that is $20 in my pocket I can use for cool other stuff. Like my motorcycle licensing exam. Or space rocks.
   
   
8. When I receive a pretend cell phone call in the liquor store asking me to pick up a bottle of strawberry-kiwi Arbor Mist instead of Sauvignon Blanc, there could actually be someone on the other end of the phone telling me I do not posses the liver of a thirty-one year old mother and housewife who is trying desperately to recapture her youth in the eighties and appear as though she at any point preferred Def Leopard to old Bee Gees records.
   
   
9. I have had my eye on a sexy nightie in the Victoria's Secret window for three weeks now. Shut up. You know I'd look good.
   
   
10. It gives me something to do on a Sunday night.
    
    
11. I have always wanted to have a skywriter under my employ.
    
    
12. I look good in the color red.

On Gender Performance

Sunday nights have recently been our fun manly nights.

Jay works the bar so everyone comes to visit him, and since it's a Sunday only a few people other than our friends ever stop in, so mostly it's just us hanging out in a bar with food and pool and darts all night. Well Jay quit tending bar this week. Apparently our happiness wasn't worth the low pay and insane, overtly racist boss and her boyfriend.

Anyway, without beer and gambling and games of skill to fall back on I decided to give up on manliness for the night and bake a chocolate souffle.

All-in-all, I found it to be a tremendous waste of time and eggs. Mostly eggs.

On Pie

I seriously tried "Pie," "meringue pie" and God help me even "cream pie" before I remember that every hilarious pie is banana cream and then BAM! there was this picture of the perfect pie. (I still would have liked to try the lemon meringue though.)



So I just watched a dude get hit in the face with a cream pie for no reason on television and I'm actually surprised at how badly I feel this voice inside me shouting, "Pie the fuck out of some dude."

"Don't think about who," he whispers, "Don't think about the consequences. Just go out and buy a pie. It's cool. It'll sit. Just take it with you and when you hear some telling a story that's really uninteresting, just do it. It's okay. They won't know what to do. Just fucking pie a bitch in the face and run. Yeah, that's right, you don't even stick around to see what happens. This isn't about that. This is about you and your desperate need to plant a pie in a man's face with all the might residing in you."

Yeah, I don't think I'm going to listen to that voice, but he's been there for such a long time I hadn't even noticed. One day soon I will simple wake up to the voice like it were my own, and every thought will culminate in the burning question 'How can I pie someone in the face with this?'

A few days later I'll probably cruise by a bakery just to look.

Then one day after I'll buy a cupcake. Maybe I'll huck it at a deer near the edge of the woods from my car and speed off.

Then I'll begin plotting the perfect pie. Custard. With just a hint of vanilla to set off the flavors of the filling and the flaky crust. I will bake for days, weeks, finding the perfect touch at every turn.

After that it's only a matter of finding the perfect prey. She will be weak at first. I will plan it meticulously. She will go unnoticed when she goes to the laundromat twice in one week.

I will escalate. There will be more victims. Each will call out to me for different reasons. Sometime I will be called without warning. I will be forced to improvise. A wedding cake with witnesses, yodels at a picnic in the park, a fatty with HoHos. However it goes I will be soppy. Evidence may be left.

Then it is only a matter of time before they find me. I will have to disappear. Curb my lust for pies. Perhaps I will build a soundproof bunker in my basement, stainless steal decor belying the most sophisticated cookware known to man.

I DON'T WANT TO DO IT VOICE NO NOT HER OKAY FINE HER BUT ONLY COCONUT OKAY FINE LEMON MERINGUE CRAP OKAY YOU ARE THE WORST MURDEROUS VOICE EVER.