You every have one those days when you don’t know whether you are coming or going? Well today is one of those days and I need to come up with something to write about for this column. I guess I could do like my favorite columnist Dave Berry of the Miami Herald did in one of his pieces, where he just talked about how long his column needed to be and how It was his job to come up with so many words for each one and so on and so forth until he had filled up the required space in his paper. Or….
I guess I could tell you some stories. How about the time one of our new buck privates right out of Marine Corps Cook school attempted to thicken the egg drop soup he was making. He took a big 10 pound box of corn starch and dumped it into the simmering soup without mixing it up with water or anything. I couldn’t believe the size of those lumps. Great big softball sized gelatinized gobs of goo. There wasn’t time to start over so we elected to put it out on the steam line for the troops. We placed a large ladle into the container of soup and watched as each of the Marines came through the line. They would ready their bowl, grab a hold of the ladle and pull it up, only to see this great big gob of goop the size of a grapefruit. They would stare at it in disbelief then drop the ladle and give us a dirty look and some times let out a few choice words. What fun!
Or Maybe I could tell you about the time another one of our well trained privates dropped a whole bag of salt into his beef stew. It looked beautiful with a gorgeous rich brown hew with just a shimmer of red tint from the proper amount of tomato sauce. He was really on his way to a masterpiece. Oh well. We didn’t have time to do anything about the stew either so we put it out on the steam line and waited.
This time the troops came by and the stew looked so good that just about everyone of them took a very generous helping. It wasn’t long however when three very perturbed Marines came marching up to us with their bowls of stew in their hands.
“This stew tastes funny,” Said the one Marine with the other two nodding in disgust,
“Well it should,” Said our chief cook, “We had a lot of laughs making it.”
There was never a dull moment in the Corps.
Actually the food for the most part was pretty good. There was a couple of mess halls that I was assigned to though that must have been conducting some kind of military experiment. We served powdered eggs from World War 2 and I think the fresh already skinned potatoes were from the same time period as well. The rumor though was that the government had a large stock pile of Agent Orange to get rid of once the ban was in place over in Viet Nam. We had further word that the Agent Orange was issued to the potato processing plant to use as a preservative. Well I tell you what, those potatoes never lost their beautiful white color. There was just one little problem though, besides glowing in the dark, you couldn’t get them to cook up tender. They were like little rubber balls. We tried baking them, frying them and mashing them. They would not brown and they would not get tender enough to mash. Finally I tried to boil a bunch of them very vigorously for several hours. They all burst open and the insides ran out leaving this thick rubber shell. From then on we just boiled them until they were hot and garnished with butter and paprika and served them to the troops. You gotta be tough to be a Marine.
That brings up another subject. I hear all the time how tough our mean green fighting machine, ground pounding grunts in the Marine corps are, but never do we cooks get any recognition for our toughness. We’re tough too!
I know what you are thinking.
“Yeah right, cooks are tough.”
Ok, you try serving rubberized potatoes, and gelatinized goo to hungry trained killers three times a day.
There, I did it. I filled up the whole required space without even mentioning that I need at least 800 words or there abouts.