Being retired and on hiatus from traveling has its rewards and its pitfalls. As a "househusband" I am constantly learning how to survive the daily struggle of uninterrupted domesticity, and I am compelled to share so that others may benefit.
Here’s a hint for the not-so-handy homeowner or kitchen novice: Your garbage disposal will not eat everything. It may sound ravenous and lethal, but, like you and your“skills, it has limits.
I've been told that banana peels and onion skins, deposited in the sink-mounted chopper, will simply affix themselves to the wall of the killing chamber and remain there until they have decomposed sufficiently to release themselves and clog the cavity exit. I don’t know if this is true, but I am not a real risk taker, so those questionable comestibles are routinely consigned to the compost bin to become fertilizer.
I was also told that adding ice cubes to the disposal will sharpen the blades as they spin. I very much doubt this. They do make a nice racket but, ice sharpening steel? I think not. As I understand the disposal process, it is more like beating a lesser rival to submission in order to dispose of it, than to hack at anything surgically or hone a blade.
So, aside from onion skins and banana peels, meat and bones, the odd errant spoon or heirloom earring, I have always assumed the hungry little ogre under my sink will devour all that is edible. I have fed it egg shells and coffee grounds, apple and lettuce cores, cooked pasta and rice, and of course the usual before- and after-dinner detritus that would ordinarily lay rotting and befouling the kitchen garbage bin. I always considered the garbage disposal my friend and helpmate in the kitchen and we lived in symbiosis for many years. Only recently have I learned an important lesson regarding one of its more important foibles: Volume.
I will explain.
My wife was born in the North but raised in the South and over the years she acquired a taste for Southern cooking that includes the ubiquitous Southern staple of collard greens. I have to admit that greens can be tasty and healthy and I also appreciate how easily they are prepared. They have become a comfort food in our house. And since a greater part of my reason for living on Earth is to give comfort to my bride, I sometimes prepare them to accompany the fried chicken, the macaroni and cheese, the ribs and buttered biscuits.
Not a big problem for me. I feel very comfortable in my kitchen, as I have always done the majority of the cooking, since I mostly worked from home and just recently took on retirement as a hobby. I have good knives, a worthy gas stove, an abundance of cooking vessels and a large assortment of foodie toys that allow me to tackle most any recipe and not poison anyone or lose an appreciable amount of blood from puncture, laceration or avulsion. I have received some compliments about my food, and while I am by no means a gourmet cook like my sister (who can produce a fresh salad in the middle of a blizzard), I enjoy the process and, especially, the end results. I am by no means a food snob; I just like to eat and I know what I like.
(On vacation in Tuscany a few years ago with my wife, a fellow traveler and diner was extolling the luxury of French foie gras and Italian risotto which was on our evening’s menu. After we’d eaten, I opined that the foie gras reminded me of liverwurst and the risotto resembled a soft version of what I often prepare at home, Rice-a-Roni, from a box. The dinner conversation took a subtle turn at that point and I thought I could hear the self-styled gourmand whisper words like “troglodyte” and “American” in the same breath. I didn’t care. I had eaten beef heart and lung soup in Austria, dog and fermented chicken eggs in Vietnam and all manner of sushi, and I felt these experiences gave me the chops to speak my mind about force-fed duck organs and gooey rice.)
But I digress.
Over the years I have learned to tackle most recipes through research and study, observation and tasting, the Food Channel, my Mother, a bookcase full of cookbooks, experimentation and the patience and objective criticism of my wife. Collards greens, therefore, posed no apparent challenge. They require a little preparation, a few extra ingredients and just some time to simmer to a tender and savory finish.
Only recently did I suffer the ill effects of false pride in my skills, the arrogance of abundance and the assumption that my Kitchen Aid buddy was my best friend. The collard greens bit me.
As I have since learned, collard greens (Brassica oleracea) are a wild cabbage from the same family as broccoli and kale, and are popular in many countries beside America, from Spain to Kashmir, Tanzania to Brazil. They are good source of vitamin C when eaten raw, have anti-cancer properties and contain but a few calories. They are one of the staples of Southern and soul food cooking in America and are typically prepared using smoked or salted meats, onions, vinegar, salt, pepper and sugar. Some traditions hold that serving collard greens on New Years Day ensures wealth in the coming months, as the raw leaves resemble folding money. What could be more benign? Cooking a mess o’ greens is certainly not the same as preparing beef Wellington (which I would not care to tackle).
Moving on. Sorry.
Okay, collards reduce in volume as they simmer in a liquid, so it is normal to start with what appears to be an unusually large amount of greens stuffed into a pot of simmering broth. But the steam and heat work on the fiber of the leaves and after some time they wilt and reduce while absorbing the flavor of the broth and spices. After an hour or so they have become a fraction of their fresh bulk.
Last Friday’s trouble began with the raw stems I’d removed from the leaves. Apparently these inedible parts of the plant are inedible for good reason. They have the fibrous structure of oak. Had I known this I would have never attempted to feed them to my disposal. Their appearance suggested the stems of broccoli or some other cooperative legume that I routinely feed to the sink ogre. So, as the light green, woody stems revolved around and round, lubricated by the tap water, as the blades of the disposal growled and hummed, turning the inside of the vessel a foamy green, the half sink full of stems disappeared down the drain and into the maw, I assumed we were never to meet again. The sink was finally empty and clean, the disposal just a black hole and silent again. Everything had been reduced to shreds and flushed. But somewhere along its route through the brass and PVC piping and into the cast iron waste pipe headed toward the municipal sewer system, the mass of tangled, snarled woody pulp stopped, lodged itself solidly against the walls of the drain, and there it waited, like the masses of fishing line that are sometimes dredged from the sea bottom by trawlers looking for shrimp.
That evening, as I ran the faucet to clean some dishes, the water began to fill the sink. Thinking something was remained caught in the disposal I flipped the switch and was rewarded with a green spray of macerated leaf stems and water. They tasted nothing like the savory green collards we’d had for dinner.
And so, here I sit, two days later. After four bottles of drain cleaner in increasingly “new and improved” formulas, two rubber plungers used to their limits, a drain snake in every conceivable orifice of my kitchen plumbing, under the sink and in the basement, and still I am not in control.
The warmth of the “comfort food” has cooled somewhat by now. My already torn rotator cuff tendon is overheated from repeated hammering on the drain with the plunger and the dinner dishes are soaking in the bathroom sink. My wife has been studiously avoiding offering to help because she’s seen the look in my eyes. She keeps smiling and I don’t want to know what she’s thinking, since it would all seem like an accusation. I feel stupid enough anyway. Where in my arrogance did I develop the notion that an oak log could be fed to a sink disposal?
I’ll figure it out, of course, sooner or later, bit by bit, through stubbornness. I may even swallow my pride and call in the big guns, like Mr. Motor Rooter or some such. He’ll stop by “between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm”, in his clean white shirt and goofy baseball hat with the happy toilet logo. He’ll smile and say, “Happens all the time!” (Not to me, Plunge Bob!). Then he’ll wheel out his super powered, steel bladed, motor driven sewer reamer and in 4 minutes the drain will be empty and clean and I will be left with four empty Drano bottles, a pound of soaking dish towels, grassy stains on my T-shirts, an ineffective little hardware store drain snake and bill for $65. It will be over, though. No real damage done except to my pride and ego and wallet.
Like I said, my wife loves her comfort food, and I love to comfort her. So I will be looking for fresh frozen collard greens and hope she doesn’t detect the difference. And I have promised myself that only those things that I can chew myself and swallow will be fed to my buddy under the sink.
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