Quite a few months ago, a friend gave us a roll of elk sausage that he had made. It sounded weird, even to me. But I promised I'd eat it and get back to him about the taste. I had tasted elk at a restaurant once. It was dry and needed salt, a lot more salt. But I didn't say that to my friend. The look on his face was that of a puppy sitting on command for the first time, eager, energetic, and sweet.
When I got home with the squishy roll that was oozing a bit of blood from the butt ends, I promptly put the thing into a Ziploc bag and onto the bottom shelf of the freezer. In the back. I didn't have to cook it right then, did I?
Oh, I eat all kinds of food. I even ate an ant once on a dare from my brother when I was about nine. He ate his live and I smashed mine, left most of its protein between my thumb and forefinger, then chased it with a Snickers bar. Nasty. I still shudder whenever I think of that, especially since my brother told me that his ant tried to climb back up his throat. I don't know if it was true but it still gags me when I think of it. True brotherly love lasts a lifetime.
So, the oozing roll of elk went out of my mind for long enough that my friend stopped asking me if I liked the taste. There are some limits to friendship, you know, and eating a roll of bloody elk sausage might be one of them.
But, there came a time, when the clear plastic Costco bag of chicken tenders indicated to Mike that it was time to eat it down. Eat it down is what Mike tells me to do whenever the stuff in the deep freeze starts to look like fossils.
I should never let him cook. First, he was not happy about having to make yet another meal. This wasn't what he signed up for when we first agreed that I would stay home with the baby. The baby was seventeen. He didn't need babysitting any more. There were dinners to make and I'm sure Mike thought about the fact that he'd just worked ten hours while I was noodling around on the computer all day, earning a total of nothing.
When he went downstairs to the freezer, did I imagine that his steps were just a little too firm? I heard plastic rustling and chunks of frost-heave falling off the roof of the freezer while he rummaged around. He walked up the steps with a bag of desiccated chicken tenders and looked me in the eye as I lounged in front of the computer.
"We need to start to eat it down again," he said. We.
"Oh, do we?" I said, innocently. He knew that I knew exactly what all that meat cost and what it currently looked like, dead, mummified, about to turn to dust.
That night, we ate peanut chicken slathered in peanut sauce so we could barely taste the dried-out and slightly off flavor of the chicken. You know what flavor I mean, freezer flavor. It's not bad, exactly. It won't send anyone to the toilet. But it had the distinct flavor I could always smell whenever I opened any freezer, mine, my mom's, my sister's, or my Grandma's . You just don't go about opening people's freezers unless they're family. You just don't. That frosty air wafts up and lays bare any notion that you are going to relish any meal that is produced from it, even Grandma's. I could always taste freezer in meat that had hung around too long. I'm sure Mike could taste it too, but there was the cost of what had gone into the freezer and, dammit, we were going to get it back out again if we had to eat that way for a month.
For the next week, I pored over the contents of the freezer each night and hoped to see something different. One block of ground beef, a quart of ice cream that Nick had somehow missed, a block of frozen squash, and chicken, lots of chicken. A whole chicken, chicken breasts, boneless skinless tasteless chicken thighs, chicken tenders, and even ground chicken. I dutifully cooked these into roasted freezer-burned chicken one night, cornflake crumby chicken another, more freezer-flavored peanut chicken, and finally chicken meatballs slow-cooked in Louisiana hot sauce. I never tasted the freezer in the chicken meatballs. I could never taste a thing while eating that Louisiana hot sauce. That night, when I made the meatballs, Mike said dinner was good.
After almost two weeks of eat it down, the freezer was finally emptied of everything but chicken thighs, miraculously the ice cream, and that rock hard roll of elk sausage on the bottom shelf of the freezer. In the back. There weren't enough thighs to make a whole meal.. I picked up the ice cream and held it in my hands. Coffee.
I loved coffee ice cream. I put it back on the shelf before my hot hands could melt it inside the container.
"You could have ice cream before dinner," a voice whispered. Steam rolled out of the freezer. Suddenly, it smelled sweet, lost the odor of raw meat. "Ice cream for dinner," it sighed. "No one would have to know. You don't have to eat that old meat shit. There are spoons down here. You could sit on the cooler and eat the whole thing until it was gone. No one would ever know."
Then, I knew. The devil lived in my freezer. Or at least in my head while I was standing in front of the open door of the freezer, in front of that glowing quart of ice cream.
If I ate that quart of ice cream, capillaries in my eyeballs would burst and I'd go blind. I'd get an immediate case of gangrene in my toes and they'd have to be cut off. I'd go into a diabetic coma and Mike would eventually find me lying on the floor with the ice cream container still in one hand, an old spoon in the other, the freezer door ajar and dropping chunks of frost onto the fake wood laminate flooring. Yes, the devil lived in my mind.
I grabbed the chicken thighs and the roll of elk sausage, slammed the door on that quart of coffee ice cream, and ran up the stairs.
I cut the little metal crimps off of either end of the elk roll and put it on a plate in the microwave to defrost. Twenty-five minutes. In the meantime, I tried a new recipe for the chicken tenders, haloumi chicken, and got to work on steaming some vegetables. The elk roll bled all over the inside of my microwave, despite the fact that I'd put a plate under it. Blood fucking everywhere. Cleaning up was so unappetizing, especially blood from raw meat.
An hour and a half later, I served beautiful plates of haloumi chicken with roasted tomatoes in virgin olive oil, virgin. There was steamed asparagus and cauliflower with butter and lemon pepper on the side plus little rounds of elk sausage with hickory smoked salt and onion.
"I didn''t like it," Mike said when he returned his plate, empty except for two elk rounds with a tiny bit missing from one edge. "Maybe it needed more salt."
"It tasted weird, Mom," Nick said, handing me his plate. His elk sausage hadn't changed shape. Did he even take one bite?
So, as I cleaned up the kitchen, Teddy and Blitz threatened to trip me. They would eat some elk. It wouldn't be a total loss. They had become accustomed to getting a tiny bit of what I had cooked for dinner. Well, Blitz got something and Teddy just stood around looking hopeful.
Poor Teddy had allergies. I'd learned my lesson on a tiny piece of steak once. The next day, he horked that steak into the crevice between the back seat and the door handle and I'd had to wipe it up. It was yellow and green and slimy.
They really wanted what I'd been cooking, these two. Blitz has learned that if he got to talking, I talked back to him until, eventually, I relented and gave him some of what I was eating. He'd eat anything. Chicken, salmon, tuna, beef. He even ate a leaf of spinach one time. That cat definitely came from a trailer park. If I'd offered him pickled pig's feet, I thought he would have eaten it.
So, I put a tiny piece of the rejected elk in front of him.
He looked at the meat, sniffed it, then looked back up at me.
"Go ahead," I said. "Try it. It's elk. What kitten do you know who gets to eat elk?"
He meowed and stepped over the tiny morsel lying on the floor. He rubbed against my ankles. He wanted chicken.
Against my better judgement, I leaned over, picked up the hunk of elk and threw it at Teddy. It hit him on the nose and fell between his feet. He sniffed it. Nope. Wasn't going to eat that shit. No way, Jose.
Blitz meowed again. He wanted something to eat, real food. They both, Teddy and Blitz, walked back and forth over that little bit of elk until I finally relented and gave them each bits of the chicken.
Over the next few days, I ate that entire roll of elk sausage myself. It was dry, tasted freezer burned, and needed salt.
Thank you for listening, jb
When I got home with the squishy roll that was oozing a bit of blood from the butt ends, I promptly put the thing into a Ziploc bag and onto the bottom shelf of the freezer. In the back. I didn't have to cook it right then, did I?
Oh, I eat all kinds of food. I even ate an ant once on a dare from my brother when I was about nine. He ate his live and I smashed mine, left most of its protein between my thumb and forefinger, then chased it with a Snickers bar. Nasty. I still shudder whenever I think of that, especially since my brother told me that his ant tried to climb back up his throat. I don't know if it was true but it still gags me when I think of it. True brotherly love lasts a lifetime.
So, the oozing roll of elk went out of my mind for long enough that my friend stopped asking me if I liked the taste. There are some limits to friendship, you know, and eating a roll of bloody elk sausage might be one of them.
But, there came a time, when the clear plastic Costco bag of chicken tenders indicated to Mike that it was time to eat it down. Eat it down is what Mike tells me to do whenever the stuff in the deep freeze starts to look like fossils.
I should never let him cook. First, he was not happy about having to make yet another meal. This wasn't what he signed up for when we first agreed that I would stay home with the baby. The baby was seventeen. He didn't need babysitting any more. There were dinners to make and I'm sure Mike thought about the fact that he'd just worked ten hours while I was noodling around on the computer all day, earning a total of nothing.
When he went downstairs to the freezer, did I imagine that his steps were just a little too firm? I heard plastic rustling and chunks of frost-heave falling off the roof of the freezer while he rummaged around. He walked up the steps with a bag of desiccated chicken tenders and looked me in the eye as I lounged in front of the computer.
"We need to start to eat it down again," he said. We.
"Oh, do we?" I said, innocently. He knew that I knew exactly what all that meat cost and what it currently looked like, dead, mummified, about to turn to dust.
That night, we ate peanut chicken slathered in peanut sauce so we could barely taste the dried-out and slightly off flavor of the chicken. You know what flavor I mean, freezer flavor. It's not bad, exactly. It won't send anyone to the toilet. But it had the distinct flavor I could always smell whenever I opened any freezer, mine, my mom's, my sister's, or my Grandma's . You just don't go about opening people's freezers unless they're family. You just don't. That frosty air wafts up and lays bare any notion that you are going to relish any meal that is produced from it, even Grandma's. I could always taste freezer in meat that had hung around too long. I'm sure Mike could taste it too, but there was the cost of what had gone into the freezer and, dammit, we were going to get it back out again if we had to eat that way for a month.
For the next week, I pored over the contents of the freezer each night and hoped to see something different. One block of ground beef, a quart of ice cream that Nick had somehow missed, a block of frozen squash, and chicken, lots of chicken. A whole chicken, chicken breasts, boneless skinless tasteless chicken thighs, chicken tenders, and even ground chicken. I dutifully cooked these into roasted freezer-burned chicken one night, cornflake crumby chicken another, more freezer-flavored peanut chicken, and finally chicken meatballs slow-cooked in Louisiana hot sauce. I never tasted the freezer in the chicken meatballs. I could never taste a thing while eating that Louisiana hot sauce. That night, when I made the meatballs, Mike said dinner was good.
After almost two weeks of eat it down, the freezer was finally emptied of everything but chicken thighs, miraculously the ice cream, and that rock hard roll of elk sausage on the bottom shelf of the freezer. In the back. There weren't enough thighs to make a whole meal.. I picked up the ice cream and held it in my hands. Coffee.
I loved coffee ice cream. I put it back on the shelf before my hot hands could melt it inside the container.
"You could have ice cream before dinner," a voice whispered. Steam rolled out of the freezer. Suddenly, it smelled sweet, lost the odor of raw meat. "Ice cream for dinner," it sighed. "No one would have to know. You don't have to eat that old meat shit. There are spoons down here. You could sit on the cooler and eat the whole thing until it was gone. No one would ever know."
Then, I knew. The devil lived in my freezer. Or at least in my head while I was standing in front of the open door of the freezer, in front of that glowing quart of ice cream.
If I ate that quart of ice cream, capillaries in my eyeballs would burst and I'd go blind. I'd get an immediate case of gangrene in my toes and they'd have to be cut off. I'd go into a diabetic coma and Mike would eventually find me lying on the floor with the ice cream container still in one hand, an old spoon in the other, the freezer door ajar and dropping chunks of frost onto the fake wood laminate flooring. Yes, the devil lived in my mind.
I grabbed the chicken thighs and the roll of elk sausage, slammed the door on that quart of coffee ice cream, and ran up the stairs.
I cut the little metal crimps off of either end of the elk roll and put it on a plate in the microwave to defrost. Twenty-five minutes. In the meantime, I tried a new recipe for the chicken tenders, haloumi chicken, and got to work on steaming some vegetables. The elk roll bled all over the inside of my microwave, despite the fact that I'd put a plate under it. Blood fucking everywhere. Cleaning up was so unappetizing, especially blood from raw meat.
An hour and a half later, I served beautiful plates of haloumi chicken with roasted tomatoes in virgin olive oil, virgin. There was steamed asparagus and cauliflower with butter and lemon pepper on the side plus little rounds of elk sausage with hickory smoked salt and onion.
"I didn''t like it," Mike said when he returned his plate, empty except for two elk rounds with a tiny bit missing from one edge. "Maybe it needed more salt."
"It tasted weird, Mom," Nick said, handing me his plate. His elk sausage hadn't changed shape. Did he even take one bite?
So, as I cleaned up the kitchen, Teddy and Blitz threatened to trip me. They would eat some elk. It wouldn't be a total loss. They had become accustomed to getting a tiny bit of what I had cooked for dinner. Well, Blitz got something and Teddy just stood around looking hopeful.
Poor Teddy had allergies. I'd learned my lesson on a tiny piece of steak once. The next day, he horked that steak into the crevice between the back seat and the door handle and I'd had to wipe it up. It was yellow and green and slimy.
They really wanted what I'd been cooking, these two. Blitz has learned that if he got to talking, I talked back to him until, eventually, I relented and gave him some of what I was eating. He'd eat anything. Chicken, salmon, tuna, beef. He even ate a leaf of spinach one time. That cat definitely came from a trailer park. If I'd offered him pickled pig's feet, I thought he would have eaten it.
So, I put a tiny piece of the rejected elk in front of him.
He looked at the meat, sniffed it, then looked back up at me.
"Go ahead," I said. "Try it. It's elk. What kitten do you know who gets to eat elk?"
He meowed and stepped over the tiny morsel lying on the floor. He rubbed against my ankles. He wanted chicken.
Against my better judgement, I leaned over, picked up the hunk of elk and threw it at Teddy. It hit him on the nose and fell between his feet. He sniffed it. Nope. Wasn't going to eat that shit. No way, Jose.
Blitz meowed again. He wanted something to eat, real food. They both, Teddy and Blitz, walked back and forth over that little bit of elk until I finally relented and gave them each bits of the chicken.
Over the next few days, I ate that entire roll of elk sausage myself. It was dry, tasted freezer burned, and needed salt.
Thank you for listening, jb
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