Of Picky Eaters, and Charred Onions

I talk a good game when it comes to helping picky eaters expand their food horizons. The whole thing with identifying common traits of foods you like and foods you don’t, coming up with potential matches to those traits, being involved in the cooking process. It totally works, and I love the moment where my student’s eyes light up as they discover that wait a second, they do like sweet potatoes!

In my own kitchen, however, my patience for the picky occasionally wears thin. Lest anyone tasked with cooking for those with texture-issued tongues and persnickety palates think that I don’t understand the temptation to throw my hands up and yell “fine! Don’t eat, then!”, I present to you the tale of my most recent run-in with the horde of finicky eaters I have somehow managed to surround myself with.

We were making burgers.

You would think that this would be simple. Very assemble-your-own, very basic flavors, very familiar textures. It turns out that nothing is simple when attempting to make burgers for a crowd that includes two standard-issue omnivores, one very picky omnivore, one kosher omnivore, and one world’s best worst vegan.

Already, I had three pans on the stove just for burgers. It was like that logic game where you have to get the wolf across the river without the chicken or the sack of grain getting eaten. The kosher hamburgers couldn’t go in a pan that had non-kosher meat. The veggie burgers couldn’t go in a pan with any meat. Then there was the bacon and the tempeh bacon finding their way into pans.

Kosher housemate had requested charred onions to go with his burger. The vegan, meanwhile, made puppy eyes about but-caramelized-onions-are-so-much-better, but we had had caramelized onions the night before with build-your-own-risotto, so I decreed that tonight would be charred onion night. Cue vegan grumbling but relenting as I slid a cast iron of onions under the broiler.

The vegan took over french fry duty while I manned the burgers. They wanted rosemary on their fries, but the picky omnivore hates rosemary (luckily, I, ahem, accidentally forgot to pick up rosemary on our shopping trip). As I started to get cranky about rinsing the one metal spatula left after the weekend’s yard sale in between flipping the burgers in the three pans that were taking up nearly my entire stove, the vegan happened to casually mention that they didn’t actually care if their burger was in a pan with meat.

I glared. I shifted pans. I realized something was burning.

The onions.

The charred onions were in flames. In fact, they had gone right past charred to reduced to ash.

The blackened remainder of onion ring had broken the cooking instructor’s proverbial spatula. I slammed the no-longer-on-fire cast iron down on the stove, told the vegan they were in charge, and stormed out of the kitchen to flop on the grass in the backyard.

It’s a very rare occasion that I lose my cool in the kitchen, but I think it happens to all of us once in a while. Things going wrong is a fact of life when it comes to cooking, whether it’s onions forgotten in the broiler or too many pans to juggle when you wish everyone would just eat the same thing. The trick is learning how to shake it off and recover, which is why I relish mistakes in my lessons. They give students the opportunity to step back, assess the situation, and solve the problem, even if that sometimes means handing utensils to someone else and going outside for a few deep breaths.

Burger dinner was a success, by the way. We used the the over-broiled pan as a centerpiece, and everyone was really impressed by what happens when you set onions on fire.