When Savory and I go on cooking binges, we tend not to mention that we each have a raging and private yen for the sheer art of complexity. Our reptilian epicurean mindsets require, as it were, a tremendous number of ingredients, sensitive temperature and timing, or at least a bit of showmanship before we consider ourselves as having truly lived up to the task of cooking something.
While I'm certain that if ever there were a recipe which required us to write a Unix shell script in time with our food, we'd be shuddering in (separate) orgasmic delight, there is something to be said for the simple. In fact, sometimes the simple is the most wonderful thing one can have.
Case and point: oven-roasted corn on the cob. I grew up in a family with both Southern American and German roots, and corn on the cob was something one boiled, slathered in butter, then consumed with those little pokey ceramic things suspending it like some sort of corn spit before our mouths. And of course, the butter ended up all over everything- kind of like inviting the Tasmanian Devil to an all-you-can-eat crab restaurant.
If you've got a gas broiler, you can come darn close to barbecue-level corn on the cob by:
- Strip the corn on the cob of silk and husk.
- Put half a stick of butter in the bottom of a pyrex baking dish, and set your broiler on high over it.
- When the butter is melted, put in your corn on the cob (4 cobs).
- Check every few minutes. When the top of the corn is dotted with roasted kernels in punch-card fashion, rotate your corn, grind on a little pepper, and sprinkle on a little salt.
Once the whole thing is pretty much roasted, you'll have the most amazing corn ever produced from an oven. In four ingredients.
Of course, now I need other methods to deplete my spice rack. Lest it grow, gain sentience, and claim sovereignty over my newly annexed kitchen. Gotta go.