Letters To Bourdain

Dear Chef Bourdain;

The first and most obvious thing I haven’t got is your book yet. This whole thing sprung from my head, Athena-like,  yesterday. It was a good idea and I’m excited, but not so good that I was going to get off my ass and drive to a bookstore or something. Especially since I was recently stung by a stingray, and walking is still neurotoxiliciously painful. But Amazon will drop “Les Halles” for me tomorrow, and I can start research from the primary source.

My kitchen is pretty well equipped, in a typical kitchen kind of way. The usual stove and range; (mental note, clean bacon grease from bottom of stove so the fire alarm stops going off, and this is no longer necessary. Yes, that’s my fiancee waving an axe at the smoke detector to make it stop.)  plenty of counterspace, pots, pans, etc. Probably my most glaring deficiency (in the kitchen, goddamit) is my lack of a stand mixer. I imagine that one is going to literally hurt, since I’ll have to whisk by hand. It’s on the wedding registry though, so hey, maybe I’ll save the mixer-intensive stuff until after May.

Strangely, I don’t have a wire cooling rack. That one is pretty easy to rectify though, heck, they have them at the dollar store. I’m also missing a wooden spoon, because I broke it jamming plastic bags into a leather bottle I was making. Seriously, that happened.  I also don’t have a pastry bag, but again, that’s pretty easy to deal with, and I can probably put off the recipes with that as a requirement for later, anyway.

I note that one of the recipes will call for pheasant. Happily  my pal Nathan, over at Ikillit has discovered a nearby pheasant-hunting club, and the season starts relatively soon. We’re planning an epic expedition to hunt, kill, dress and cook our own pheasant, per your recipe. So technically that means a shotgun is a piece of kitchen equipment I’m missing. Somehow I imagine that you, Anthony Bourdain, would approve. You and Ted Nugent.

I think that’s it for equipment I’ll need, which is probably a relief to my crazy axe babe fiancee, who knows I tend to go a little nuts with hobbies, projects and equipment.

So let’s get fuckin’ cooking!

Davy

P.S. that f-bomb was totally obligatory. But I do feel obliged, you’re kind of a bastard that way, Chef.